= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Aharon comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - 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 (293)
I wouldn't dream of speaking for rationalists generally, but in order to provide a data point I'll answer for myself. I have one child; my wife and I were ~35 years old when we decided to have one. I am by any reasonable definition a rationalist; my wife is intelligent and quite rational but not in any very strong sense a rationalist. Introspection is unreliable but is all I have. I think my motivations were something like the following.
Having children as a terminal value, presumably programmed in by Azathoth and the culture I'm immersed in. This shows up subjectively as a few different things: liking the idea of a dependent small person to love, wanting one's family line to continue, etc.
Having children as a terminal value for other people I care about (notably spouse and parents).
I think I think it's best for the fertility rate to be close to the replacement rate (i.e., about 2 in a prosperous modern society with low infant mortality), and I think I've got pretty good genes; overall fertility rate in the country I'm in is a little below replacement and while it's fairly densely populated I don't think it's pathologically so, so for me to have at least one child and probably two is probably beneficial for society overall.
I expected any child I might have to have a net-positive-utility life (for themselves, not only for society at large) and indeed probably an above-average-utility life.
I expected having a child to be a net positive thing for marital harmony and happiness (I wouldn't expect that for every couple and am not making any grand general claim here).
I don't recall thinking much about the benefits of children in providing care when I'm old and decrepit, though I suppose there probably is some such benefit.
So far (~7.5 years in), we love our daughter to bits and so do others in our family (so #1,#2,#5 seem to be working as planned), she seems mostly very happy (so #4 seems OK so far), it's obviously early days but my prediction is still that she'll likely have a happy life overall (so #4 looks promising for the future) and I don't know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
I first wanted to comment on 5, because I had previously read that having children reduces happiness. Interestingly, when searching a link (because I couldn't remember where I had read it), I found this source (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf) that corrobates your specific expectation: children lead to higher happiness for older, better educated parents.
Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.
I think the paper you're thinking of is Kahneman et al's A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method.
Notably,
On the other hand, having children also harms marital satisfaction. See, for example, here.
How excellent! It's nice to be statistically typical :-).