= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
handoflixue comments on One Life Against the World - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (81)
Cost of a first-world child is.... checks random Google result $180,000 to get them to age 18. Cost of saving a kid in Africa from dying of Malaria is ~$1,000.
Right now having children is massively selfish, because there's options that are more than TWO magnitudes of order more effective. It'd be like blowing up the train in order to save the deaf kids from the original post :)
Well, yes, but my point is that this is a rather unreasonable clause, since if we actually pay attention to what we can efficiently do, "have children" doesn't even make the Top 100. So why would you possibly focus on "have children", and treat it as a dilemma?
I interpreted that line as a cached-though / brush off, not "of course I've done the math, and there's a thousand more effective things, but I still find it odd that having children can EVER be a positive act. I mean, ew, babies! Those can't be good for the world o.o"
I suppose it's the difference between asking "is it better to blow up the train" and asking "can it be better to blow up the train?" It's worth noting that even if we have an obligation to create lives, our obligation to save them is easier to fulfill; but it's still worth knowing if the two are actually equivalent.
Reading the original comment, adam does, in fact, seem to have assumed that having children would be the right choice if it mattered, so ... point, I guess.
Oooh, I like that distinction, and will try to remember it in the future :)
Not necessarily. A full argument would consider the opportunities available to a child you raise -- it's perfectly possible for a single first-world child to be a more productive than 180 kids in Africa.
There's also the counter-point (to my previous point) that having children discourages other people from having children, due to the forces of the market (greater demand for stuff available to children => greater costs of stuff available to children). Of course, the effect on demand is spread out to stuff other than just stuff available to children, so overall this does not cause an equal and opposite reaction.
If you successfully teach your child to be utilitarian, effective altruist, etc., though, the utility of both previous points are dwarfed by this (the second point is dwarfed because the average first-world child probably wouldn't pick up utilitarianism, EA). I'm not sure what the probability of a child picking up stuff like that is (and it would make one heck of a difficult experiment), but my guess is that if taught properly it would be likely enough to dwarf the utility of the first two points.