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Lumifer comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong
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The same what motivates other people. Being rational doesn't necessarily change your values.
Clearly, some people think having children is worthwhile and others don't, so that's individual. There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don't make it though natural selection.
The amount of decision-making also obviously varies -- from multi-year deliberations to "Dear, I'm pregnant!" :-)
Really? The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children. And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.
Humans, oddly enough, seem to have evolved adaptations for ensuring that people have unplanned pregnancies in spite of their big brains. Human females don't have an obvious estrus cycle, their fertile periods are often unpredictable, and each individual act of copulation has a relatively low chance of causing a pregnancy. As a result, humans are often willing to have sex when they don't want children and end up having them anyway.
These are not mutually exclusive alternatives.
Not in those animals where babies require a long period of care and protection.
Yes, you're right. I didn't think to put the "take care of your children once they're out of the uterus" programming into the same category.
A developmentally complex species needs a drive to care for offspring. A simple species just needs a drive to reproduce.
ETA: What Lumifer said
Women talk to me about baby fever all the time. Lucky me, eh.
True, but it might make you weigh them very differently if you understand how biased your expectations are. I'm interested if people make some rational predictions about how happy having children will make them for example.
I already have a pretty good idea about how people in general make these decisions, hence the specific question.