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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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Questions conditional on counterfactuals are usually not worth addressing.
Nature isn't "cruel" - see: http://alife.co.uk/essays/evolution_is_good/
It isn't "slavery" if you want to do it.
The only thing that matters is whether you want something (in a sufficiently reflective sense of "want", which is still an unsolved problem). The evolution's "preferences" are screened off by human preferences, so you should bring the evolution into discussion only where it helps to understand the human preferences deeper, as is the case with, for example, evolutionary psychology.
Maybe I should not be surprised to encounter people that have had their biological goal systems hijacked by memes. History is full of such people.
My impression is that advanced, meme-rich countries - such as Japan - have naturally low birth rates due to such effects.
It appears to me that the smartest and best-educated people are the ones who are the most vulnerable to infection.
In case of Japan, there might be another heuristic at work: "the place is overpopulated, high population means low resources, low resources means less healthy offspring, therefore it might be a good idea to hold off reproduction until I find a less populated place." -- I vaguely remember reading something along these lines about mice, but can't cite the source.
(Of course I'm not talking about restricting reproduction to conserve resources 'for the group').
If you are interested in the topic, there's a fairly detailed analysis of the origin of the "demographic transition" in the book "Not by Genes Alone". They mostly finger human culture.