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Kawoomba comments on Some thoughts on having children - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (106)
Disclaimer: parent of a bunch o' kids.
The question of "should one have children" is very different from "should YOU have children", as "should a randomly chosen LW'er on average have children" is different from "should an American", or "should a human being (including Somalians) have children". Asking the question broadest in scope, even if answered "correctly", yields mostly personally inapplicable results.
Many of the arguments you gave pertain to the generic "should one have children" more so than they do to the readership of your article, thus losing a good amount of relevancy.
Case in point: all of the different heritability coefficients are dependent on the choice of population. As you become a more reflective person with more options open for you to take, heritability coefficients change. It's like asking about the heritability of IQ going off of dog populations, then concluding that different parenting styles have only x or y impact because the dogs' "parenting" barely impacted their litter's IQ. Higher environmental variance leads to smaller heritability coefficients.
Generically determined factors are still useful data points for public policy debates; they are not for personal choices. There is no logical contradiction there. Someone who wholeheartedly embraces polyamory for his/her personal lifestyle may well conclude that society may be better off living majority-monogamic. Atheists may prefer for the masses to retain religiously instilled doctrines to maintain societal stability (as a tangent, do you really want your janitor to question deeply why he should clean up your trash?).
Another point you make is too US-centric. Yes, raising children is an expensive enterprise in most circumstances, but points of contention such as paying for a college education are a non-issue in some societies, such as many European countries ("student" and "debt" don't share the same word cloud).
More fundamentally, there are a number of implicit assumptions skewing the topic: the equation of morality with charity; most any utilitarian would agree that for altruism to be valued it itself must be encoded in the valuer's own utility function, tautologically so. Someone who values personal procreation over "charities" is as moral as the perfect altruist, each fulfilling their respective utility functions.
Much of the "children as economic caretakers when you reach old age" misses the point. In modern societies, the imperative is less on providing material comfort (though that motif is still present, just less so than in comparison to previous ages) and more on "having people around who give a damn about you".
People who (if you do it right) don't need to be bought, or to be entertained using one's public persona, but who have access to your inner thoughts and care about you because you constructed them that way, providing both nature and nurture. Someone to be there, not to pay the bills but to enjoy and celebrate life, and let you share in that experience (and vice versa).
When you do see someone taking care of someone else for extended periods of time, is it typically a friend, or a relative? That may be too generic, but even in our subpopulation I've yet to hear of the High-IQ-Solstice-friends who then move in with each other once one of them loses his edge due to onsetting dementia. Cameraderie and warm fuzzies between friends are nice and all, but concerning their perceived scope are ultimately a fleeting illusion.
To the obvious response of "yea, look how well those parent-child relationships typically work out, check out all the lonely parents in nursing homes", I'd say "correct for the generic case, but these people ain't doing it right":
Just as guns don't grow on trees, neither does parenting. As with optimizing most other human activity, brains help. If you exchanged the Silicon Valley population with randomly chosen humans with innovative products as the yardstick, you'd be quick to conclude that human advancement is doomed and that in any case it's time to climb back up dem trees, once we lost enough weight for the branches not to break. Wrong study sample, especially as a base for your own personal decisions.
Wow, that was excellent, thanks for writing that.
I actually think that many effective altruists/ utilitarians would disagree with that and assert that there is precisely one correct moral action or use of money at any one point in time - it varies based on circumstance of course but for any one circumstance there is one correct action. Rachels would certainly disagree with that, and jeff kaufman seemed to be convinced by Rachel's argument.
If you include spouses under "friends", that might be quite common? I would say typically the spouse will contribute more working-hours in total, although children will be helpful in the last few years.
I most certainly don't. Relative usually refers to "someone connected by blood, marriage, or adoption".
But then what is the relevance to the question of whether to have children or not? The rest of your comment seems to implicitly assume that the only way to get more relatives is to have children.
My comment focused on children because that's the topic at hand; building a strong long-time bond with a significant other (or others, if you're so inclined) can be another avenue (often less reliable) of attaining a dependable support group. The comment wasn't meant to be exhaustive.
Personally I'd never put a spouse in the same category as "friends" in this context, but of course you may categorize whichever way you like. (For example, I'd agree that if you count children as friends, then friends would always be preferable, since (friends including children) is strictly more support than (just children). Such trivial labelling tennis wouldn't change the underlying dynamics, of course.)
Yes, exactly. I'd add:
...because the best cryopreservation arrangements won't do you much good if nobody notices you died until the neighbors complain about the smell.
This is true, when I wrote this I wrote mostly reacting to the many reasons that I have heard people give for not having children. With the "but its so much work!" and "but I could be spending that money on famine relief!" arguments being the most painful to my ears. So by writing about the negative case, I didn't have space (nor frankly the expertise) to write about the positive case for having children, which you have done a great job of presenting.
Even though reasonably well-off people in the US don't seem to do a lot of hands-on care of elderly relatives, they end up doing a lot of bureaucracy-wrangling-- or at least this is the impression I get from my social circle.