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John_Maxwell_IV comments on A critique of effective altruism - Less Wrong
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Tangential: has their been discussion on LW of the EA implications of having kids? Personally, I would expect that having kids would at least be positive expected utility since they would inherit a good number of your genes/memes and be more likely than a person randomly chosen from the population to become effective altruists. But the opportunity costs seem really high.
I'm also curious how people feel about increasing fertility among reasonably smart people in general.
Yes.
There are much cheaper and faster ways to increase the total number of EAs than procreation. Suppose some EA donor is considering spending half a million dollars in EA movement-building. Would anyone in his right mind think that the most effective thing this person can do is to pay that sum of money to an EA who wants to have a child but couldn't otherwise afford it? (Having a child costs about USD 0.5 million, according to this source. If you think this estimate is inaccurate, just rerun the argument above with your chosen figure.)
If EAs never procreate then in the long run all of the genes that would cause one to become an EA will get selected out of the population. So yes, right now there is fairly low-hanging fruit in terms of EA movement-building that does not involve having children. But in the long run it's definitely something we want EAs to be doing.
Create? That's interesting terminology.
I changed it to