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Princess_Stargirl comments on Review: Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids - Less Wrong
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Sadly this book basically convinced me I cannot have children with my current partner. We would need to adopt and my partner is very smart (singnifigantly more inteelgent than myself and I have 1570/1600 SAT and a PHD in pure math). Even if you adopt from mainland China the IQ of an adopted child is unlikely to be unusually high.
I personally would not care about the IQ of my children. I personally have a very strong aversion to nudging or pushing anyone (unless they are a violent criminal). I am fairly certain a lack of educational success would not other me at all. I have taught low level University math courses. My "gut feeling" was the material was suitable for HS sophomores. But the students lack of math ability/interest/education never annoyed me, despite it annoying many of colleagues. I just wanted to help them get through the annoying math requirement.
My partner on the other hand comes from a family very focused on education. She pays lip service to the idea that intelligence is largely genetic but I know she doesn't alieve it. I am sure she would push any children to be "successful." And given her extremely high intelligence her expectations will be totally unreasonable.
Luckily she is pretty ambivalent about children. She prefers to not have them but I am pretty sure if I was very pro having children she would not be hard to convince. But given her attitude toward parenting I think us having children would be an extremely poor idea.
I would be very careful about being convinced by any one source to make a major life decision. This applies not only to books, but generalizes to single scientific studies, single "heroes" (see recent threads about sidekicks), etc. Science has peer review, and even ideas that are not strictly speaking science are stronger when they have survived questioning from opponents. I would ask myself if other books by other people argue the opposite and seem equally convincing. I would also ask myself if such ideas as are in the book have become widely accepted, and if not, why.
So, given that it's a parenting book that argues "heredity dominates, so don't worry too much about how you parent so long as you don't do any huge damage," I would expect it to undersell relative to parenting books that take the opposite tack- because it appeals to lazier parents who are less likely to buy books. (As far as I can tell, Caplan is reading the literature correctly.)
It took me a moment to figure out what you're saying came from the book and what didn't; for the benefit of others (and also so you can correct me if I misunderstood) may I make what I think you said more explicit?
I have to say, looking at what you've written, that actually it seems like having children would be a whole lot of No Fun for you and your partner even if everything in this book is wrong -- because your partner would want to push them to succeed while you have a "very strong aversion" to even nudging them. It seems like such a major disagreement over how children should be raised would suggest not having any, regardless of whether your preferences or your partner's fit the evidence better.
(I feel uncomfortable making such personal remarks about a couple I don't even know. My apologies if it makes you uncomfortable too.)