juliawise comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong

17 Post author: jsalvatier 29 May 2012 06:00PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 01 June 2012 06:39:42AM 3 points [-]

A lot of your posts leave me with the impression that you think the right wing has all the facts on its side, but it only means you need to oppose them that much more heroically. This is a terribly perverse point of view, all the moreso because there are some facts that support left wing opinions too.

For instance, you'll note that Vladimir_M is perfectly open about the scarcity of scientific literature supporting his gut feeling about peer effects. A parent came along to say she wasn't worried about peer effects for her own children, not that it was her moral duty to throw their safety to the wind.

Comment author: juliawise 01 June 2012 01:47:37PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not actually a parent yet, but I do plan to have kids and to raise them in a mixed-income neighborhood (somewhere in Cambridge MA).

I do think peer effects exist. Having worked in a local school full of both "underclass" kids and professors' children, which is the mix you get in Cambridge, I do think the poorer kids have a somewhat negative effect on the richer kids. I expect there will be some negative effects to my kids from not living in a bubble. However, I love the area and I think that living there will be good for the family, better than going into the kind of debt Vladimir_M mentioned to afford all-rich neighborhoods or private schools. We like living in a city, we like not owning a car, we having no debt. Those things mean living near some poor people.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 June 2012 03:29:43PM 3 points [-]

I accept the correction, but now I don't see a difference between your points of view. Certainly what you write above is more delicately phrased than "poor people are crocodiles", but VMs comment was also more delicately phrased than that.