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9eB1 comments on Is it immoral to have children? - Less Wrong Discussion
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One controversial or taboo possibility is that an intellectually elite Less Wrong poster may have much more of an impact on technological/economic progress by investing in a child than an equivalent investment in the third-world poor. One could argue that the majority of technological progress is driven by the top few % of people (measured either through intellect or economic resources), and that people in third-world countries (i.e. those who would benefit from bed nets) aren't really in a position to cause much impact.
Why invest the money in your child? If you want to produce smart children, donate to science camps, college funds of tech colloeges or whatever seems most promising. It seems a priori highly unlikely that the best way to invest 500k into producing top researchers or inventors (or basically anything) is by having a child yourself. Even if you have amazing genes, that would only be an argument for sperm donation.
The per-dollar returns on education funding are unfortunately really dismal. The choke point in our Fritz Haber/Norman Borlaug/Edward Jenner pipeline is not the amount of science education out there. It's a combination of the low-hanging fruit being picked, insufficient investment in novel approaches and not enough geniuses. You could invest the money in far-horizon science research but 500k dries up really quickly that way. If you can have a kid with say, a 5% chance of an IQ over 155 it seems plausible that is the optimal use of that money.
Not everyone has sperm. But even if you do donating is really unlikely to have the same effect as finding a woman whose genes are similarly excellent and have a bunch of children with her.
The investment of 500k is certainly still sub-optimal but the lesson there is to not spend half a million dollars on your child. You can reduce this cost by having more children (which will bring the per-child cost down), by not spoiling them with status signal purchases and not paying $200,000 for an elite college education when a state-school is sufficient.
Very true. Each year we produce thousands of new Ph.D.s and import thousands more, while slowly choking off funding for basic research, so they languish in a post-doc holding pattern until many of them give up and go do something less innovative but safer.
If genius is a limiting factor, and genius is often under utilized, then spending half a million on increasing the odds of full utilization of a genius may be a good investment. If you can arrange for that genius to be your own child, you would be best situated to spend that half million for maximal effect.
Only if you're only allowed to have one child, for some reason.
Is this really the case? Maybe the US and Western Europe are covered but is you have someone really smart born in a poorer part of the world how likely are they to come anywhere near their potential in terms of positive impact on humanity?
One scenario that makes it relatively more attractive is if you believe that society already provides the resources needed for similarly situated people to achieve close to their potential, so there isn't more "room for funding" in GiveWell parlance. Another possibility is that it's actually more expensive to have an impact than naive analysis would suggest because actually influencing other people's children in a meaningful way is very difficult and having direct control of the environment is the most important aspect.
Agreed. Plus the child themself will have a blessed life.