pianoforte611 comments on Some thoughts on having children - Less Wrong

5 Post author: pianoforte611 08 January 2014 05:26PM

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Comment author: Oligopsony 08 January 2014 06:18:23PM *  6 points [-]

Also, deontic concerns about forcing existence on people.

As Apprentice points out the heritability of prosocial behaviors such as cooperativeness, empathy and altruism is 0.5, and I think most people here are aware that IQ has a heritability around that number as well and is a pretty good predictor of life outcomes. If you want to increase the number of people in the world that are like yourself, then having children is a great way of doing so.

I would submit that most people are not very good about judging whether they are prosocial geniuses. (This goes double for people who are likely to be reading this.)

Also: inasmuch as the problem with sperm (and egg) donation is lack at the demand rather than supply end, surely one should seek to enter in on the demand side. Perhaps you really are a prosocial genius, but surely you are not the prosocialest geniusest. You probably suck in other ways too.

Also: heritability is not contribution, but that's veering towards a debate we've had and mostly exhausted already.

Moreover, the people you would save by donating to charity would also have children and those children would have children all of whom might require yet more aid in the future. Thus the short term gains in QALYs that giving to GiveWell recommended charities provides lead to a long term drain of resources and human capital.

That "might" is doing a lot of work here. The overall effect of economic development is to greatly reduce fertility.

Comment author: pianoforte611 08 January 2014 06:25:46PM *  1 point [-]

"The overall effect of economic development is to greatly reduce fertility."

That's very interesting, why is that?

Comment author: Oligopsony 08 January 2014 06:30:14PM 4 points [-]

Educated women have less children, reduced childhood mortality means less hedging to reach a desired number of children, above-noted changes away from agriculture and mandatory public schooling reduce the economic value of child labor, some other stuff.

Comment author: pianoforte611 09 January 2014 03:03:21AM 1 point [-]

Wait a minute does providing malaria nets or deworming kits lead to economic development?

Comment author: Oligopsony 09 January 2014 08:04:47AM 3 points [-]

Sure. Or more glibly, does malaria not inhibit economic development?

Comment author: [deleted] 08 January 2014 06:28:26PM 3 points [-]