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cousin_it comments on Open Thread: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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The antinatalist argument goes that humans suffer more than they have fun, therefore not living is better than living. Why don't they convert their loved ones to the same view and commit suicide together, then? Or seek out small isolated communities and bomb them for moral good.
I believe the answer to antinatalism is that pleasure != utility. Your life (and the lives of your hypothetical kids) could create net positive utility despite containing more suffering than joy. The "utility functions" or whatever else determines our actions contain terms that don't correspond to feelings of joy and sorrow, or are out of proportion with those feelings.
The suicide challenge is a non sequitur, because death is not equivalent to never having existed, unless you invent a method of timeless, all-Everett-branch suicide.
By the standard you propose, "never having existed" is also inadequate unless you invent a method of timeless, all-Everett-branch means of never having existed. Whatever kids an antinatalist can stop from existing in this branch may still exist in other branches.
Precisely.
If the utility of the first ten or fifteen years of life is extremely negative, and the utility of the rest slightly positive, then it can be logical to believe that not being born is better than being born, but suicide (after a certain age) is worse than either.
I think that's getting at a non-silly defense of antinatalism: what if the average experience of middle school and high school years is absolutely terrible, outweighing other large chunks of life experience, and adults have simply forgotten for the sake of their sanity?
I don't buy this, but it's not completely silly. (However, it suggests a better Third Alternative exists: applying the Geneva Convention to school social life.)
Quite right. Suicide rates spike in adolescence, go down, and only spike again in old age, don't they? Suicide is, I think, a good indicator that someone is having a bad life.
(Also, I've seen mentions on LW of studies that people raising kids are unhappier than if they were childless, but once the kids are older, they retrospectively think they were much happier than they actually were.)
Suicide rates start at .5 in 100,000 for ages 5-14 and rise to about 15 in 100,000 for seniors.
Interesting. From page 30, suicide rates increase monotonically in the 5 age groups up to and including 45-54 (peaking at 17.2 per 100,000), but then drops by 3 to 14.5 (age 55-64) and drops another 2 for the 65-74 age bracket (12.6), and then rises again after 75 (15.9).
So, I was right that the rates increase again in old age, but wrong about when the first spike was.
Unfortunately, the age brackets don't really tell you if there's a teenage spike, except that if there is one, it happens after age 14. That 9.9 could actually be a much higher level concentrated within a few years, if I understand correctly.
Suicide rates may be higher in adolescence than at certain other times, but absolutely speaking, they remain very low, showing that most people are having a good life, and therefore refuting antinatalism.
Suicide rates are not a good measure of how good life is except at a very rough level since humans have very strong instincts for self-preservation.
My counterpoint to the above would be that if suicide rates are such a good metric, then why can they go up with affluence? (I believe this applies not just to wealthy nations (ie. Japan, Scandinavia), but to individuals as well, but I wouldn't hang my hat on the latter.)
Suicide rates are a measure of depression, not of how good life is. Depression can hit people even when they otherwise have a very good life.
Yes yes, this is an argument for suicide rates never going to zero - but again, the basic theory that suicide is inversely correlated, even partially, with quality of life would seem to be disproved by this point.
I suspect the majority of adolescents would also deny wishing they had never been born.
I'm surprised the Paul Graham essay "Why Nerds are Unpopular" wasn't linked there.
Whenever anyone mentions how much it sucks to be a kid, I plug this article. It does suck, of course, but the suckage is a function of what our society is like, and not of something inherent about being thirteen years old.
Why Nerds Hate Grade School