I went to the Cambridge, MA LessWrong/Rationality "MegaMeetup" and it was almost exclusively students
Weird; that's not my memory of it or my perception of the group. The meetup was at Harvard, which meant we had a couple more students than usual, but I think 80%+ of the local people at the meetup were out of school.
At the meetup yesterday night, which I remember better, there were about 15 of us and I think only one student (late 30s statistics grad student).
Is there a Boston EA community substantially disjoint from this LW/Rationality group that you're talking about?
There's a lot of overlap, but it's a separate group. Looking over the rsvps at our most recent dinner I count 8 people who also go to lesswrong, and 15 who don't. On the same list i count three students.
are there many historical examples of movements that experience rapid growth on college campuses but then were able to grow strongly elsewhere?
The history of movements is something I'd like to know more about, but haven't really looked into much. (One thing I found frustrating when I did is that there's a huge amount of survivorship bias.)
Facebook did this, though it's not a movement.
I expect a lot of the rosy pictures people have of translating money or other fungibles into EA converts will not stand up to scrutiny
I agree, and am similarly pessimistic. But $100k is still a lot of money, and we don't yet have that much experience trying to figure out how to spend it.
I do not hear many people describe it as "I had heard about these ideas a few times, but it was only when Bob [who was supported by EA funding] took the time to sit and talk with me for a few hours that I was convinced."
There are very few Bobs who are supported by EA funding, but I can think of several people who switched to EA after lots of talking with existing EAs. Right now we have relatively little personal outreach and relatively more digital/idea-based outreach, so we should expect to meet more people who were receptive to the arguments when they heard them remotely.
did the church reduce its emphasis on having children so that parents would have more free money to give to the church?
I'm not sure the church was strategic or flexible enough to do this, and even then I doubt kids were anywhere near as expensive as then. Specifically, I think the age at which a kid went from net-consumer to net-producer was something like 9 compared to today's 22. (But I'm not very informed on this.)
historians ... we could use a lot more data and systematic analysis.
Yes!
In "The Immorality of Having Children" (2013, pdf) Rachels presents the "Famine Relief Argument against Having Children":
They present this as a special case of Peter Singer's argument from Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972), which is why they haven't called it something more reasonable like the "Opportunity Cost Argument".
[Note: the use of "Famine Relief" here is in reference to Peter Singer's 1972 example, but famine relief is not where your money does the most good. Treat the argument as "that money would be far better spent on GiveWell's top charities" or whatever organization you think is most effective.]
It's true that having and raising a child is very expensive. They use an estimate of $227k for the direct expenditure through age 18 while noting that college [1] and time costs could make this much higher. Let's use a higher estimate of $500k to account for these. Considered over twenty years, that's $25k/year or $2k/month. This puts it at the top of the range of expenses, next to housing. It's also true that this money can do a lot of good when spent on effective charities. At GiveWell's current best estimate of $2.3k this is enough money to save nearly one life per month. [2]
But perhaps we shouldn't be thinking of this money as an expense at all, and instead more as an investment? Could having kids be a contender for the most effective charity? That is, could having and raising kids be one of the most effective things you could do with your time and money?
For example you could convince your kid to be unusually generous, donating far more than they cost to raise. Except that it's much cheaper to convince other people's kids to be generous, and our influence on the adult behavior of our children is not that big. Alternatively, if you're unusually smart, by having kids you could help make there be more smart people in the future. But how many more generations will pass before we learn enough about the genetics of intelligence to make this aspect of parental genetics irrelevant? Rachels considers the idea that your having children might greatly benefit the world, and rightly finds it insufficient. While your child may do a lot of good, for the expense there are much better options. Having kids is not a contender for the most effective charity, or even very close.
Having kids is a special case of spending your time and money in ways that make you happy. A moral system for human beings needs to allow some amount of this. It's like working for $56k at a job you enjoy instead of getting $72k at a job you like less. [3] Or spending your free time reading instead of working extra hours building up a consulting business. Keeping in mind both the cost and that on average people don't seem to be happier parenting, if having kids is what would make you most happy for the expense in time and money then it seems justified.
(This is how Julia and I thought of it when deciding whether we should have kids.)
I also posted this on my blog.
[1] College is currently in a huge state of flux. Advertised costs are rising far faster than inflation as colleges realize they can get away with near perfect price discrimination in the form of "either pay the extremely high sticker price or give us all your financial data so we can determine exactly how much you can afford." At the same time online courses and mixed models are getting to where they can provide much of the value of traditional lecture courses, and in some ways do better. I have very little idea what to budget for college for a kid born now; likely costs range from "free" to "all you have".
[2] Rachels uses a much lower number:
Their Brenzel citation is to the Vaccine-Preventable Diseases section of the DCP2. The $205 number is "Estimated cost per death averted for the Traditional Immunization Program in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia" in table 20.5.
[3] This is a $16k difference, which comes from taking $500k over 20 years and dividing by two for the two parents, and then adding some for taxes. Though the earnings difference is likely to last more like 40 years.