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James_Miller comments on Rationality Quotes Thread April 2015 - Less Wrong
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But what if I can get taxpayers to feed my baby?
Can you also get them to pay for cryonics? I don't know if you consider cryonics worthwhile, but the point is that "feed" generalizes easily.
The difference is that babies suffer if they starve, but not if they don't have cryonics.
The badness of making an extra life comes from its suffering (+ negative externalities) [- positive externalities]
Interesting... can you say more about why you include a term in that equation for internal negative value (what you label "suffering" here), but not internal positive value (e.g., "pleasure" or "happiness" or "joy" or "Fun" or whatever label we want to use)?
I suppose it was because the original quote started with a negative framing, the assumption that the baby might not be fed.
I think both birth and death are stressful experiences that are not worth going through unless there are compensating other factors. I don't think infants have enough of those if they die before they grow up.
Also I suspect human life is generally overrated, and the positives of life are often used as an excuse to justify the suffering of others. I do not trust people to make a realistic estimate and act with genuine benevolence.
Af first I thought you doing that Redditesque sarcasm, in which you argue a straw man of the outgroup in a mocking way, which made me disappointed since the goal is signaling rather than discourse.
However perhaps you are being serious? Are social services a valid means of feeding a baby, rendering the original quote not applicable in countries where social services exist? I think the answer is obviously yes, in that if social services are available, people are going to use them. Whether the should exist is a separate discussion.
I was being serious. Abstractly, if my doing X requires Y, but I don't have Y but I'm confident that if I do X the government will give me Y, then my lack of Y isn't much of a reason to forgo X.
I think it's a law that if you fund something you get more of it. Serious discussion of safety nets, etc. already assumes some parasite response from the "ecosystem," takes it into account, and argues safety nets are still a good thing on net.
I think "unintended consequences" is a better analysis framework than "parasite response from the ecosystem".
And speaking of, there is a recent paper discussed on MR which claims to show how safety nets drive down the decline in labor force participation and, in particular, that "the Clinton-era welfare reforms lowered the incentive to work".
It certainly sounds less cynical, unless we use strong charity and see it in the most technical way possible.
I think the most plausible use case for government-funded incentives to have extra kids is a wide consensus that a society doesn't have enough of them at the time, according to some economical or social optimum.
But even this requires a level of cynicism in seeing kids as a means to an end.