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Eitan_Zohar comments on Stupid Questions June 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is it unethical to have children pre-Singularity, for the risk of them dying?
Well, everyone will likely die sooner or later, even post-Singularity (provided that it will happen, which isn't quite a solid fact).
Anyway, I think that any morality system that proclaims unethical all and every birth happened so far is inadequate.
Yes, if humanity actually started to follow such system, it would be a human race version of a movie robot getting confused by a logical paradox and exploding out of existence.
No, it's better to live a good finite life than to have never been born.
I've always been uncomfortable with this kind of reasoning. You say it would be better to live than to never have been born. Better for who? Can we say that a nonexistent person has utility, or any properties at all? I don't believe so; I think I agree with Kant that existence is not a predicate. From SEP:
I don't get most philosophy, but this does seem like a silly question. Things that exist have properties such as mass that things that don't exist lack.
Consider the subset of all possible human minds that would rather exist than not exist. Each are, tautologically I think, better off existing. One reason I hope for a positive singularity is so that far more of these minds will have a chance to live. I think the greatest form of inequality is between the subset of this subset that gets to exist and those that don't.
Yes, there are possible minds that would rather exist than not exist. However, those minds don't exist, so why should I factor them into my utility function? I'm not doing 'them' a disservice, since there is no 'them' that I'm doing a disservice to.
It seems to me equivalent to Anselm's ontological argument, where we say that since god is by definition the greatest, and it's greater to exist than to not exist, then god must exist. The counterargument is that god, not existing, has no properties. Attempting to take into account the properties of nonexistent or hypothetical entities leads us to all sorts of weird conclusions.
Unless you believe the end times are here and the Rapture is imminent, who will bring it about if no-one has children?
The next 20 years could be crucial, yes.
I figure it's better to live for the better part of a century than to not live at all.
So, every possible human that could exist has moral value? Why isn't it more ethical to produce as many children as will fit in a female's lifespan?
Rescuing lives in the third world is cheaper than getting children, if your goal is altruism. On the other hand altruism isn't the only reason to get children.
If your goal is altruism, and you value all people equally, anyway. Not many people outside of here do.
If your goal isn't altruism then why ask "Why isn't it more ethical to produce as many children as will fit in a female's lifespan?". Simply get as many children as you want to have.
The "and" in my reply connects two separate conditions. It is possible that your goal is altruism but you don't value people equally. The question of whether having many children is ethical could depend on exactly what factors you use to weigh your children over strangers.
This looks like one hell of an occasion for satisficing instead of optimizing.
I was being rhetorical. I don't think there is any moral obligation for someone who never existed to exist.
It's not practical in the short term. Long term, I think we should build Dyson spheres or whatever else it takes to make as many happy people as possible.
What do you mean by every possible human that could exist having moral value? If you think it's bad to create them and then kill them, you're already assigning moral value. We already seem to agree on the idea that creating and then killing a person and not creating a person are morally comparable and not of equal value. The only question is which is better.
No, I don't think that an uncreated person has value. Why would it?
Or am I misinterpreting?
Maybe not for that reason. But the opportunity cost of having kids, for example in terms of time and money, is pretty high. You could easily make an argument that those resources would be more effectively used for higher impact activities.
The money as dead children analogy might be particularly useful here, since we're comparing kids with kids.
Such cost calculations are wildly overestimated.
Suppose you buy a luxury item, like a golden ring with brilliants. You pay a lot of money, but your money isn't going to disappear; it is redistributed between traders, jewelers, miners, etc. The only thing that's lost is the total effort required to produce that ring, which often costs lesser by an order of magnitude. And if the item you buy is actually useful, the wasted effort is even lower.
The cost of having kids is so high for you, because you will likely raise well-educated children with high intelligence, which are valuable assets to our society; likely being net positive, after all. Needless to say, actually ensuring that these poor children in Africa will end up that well, rather than, say, die of starvation the next year, is going to cost you much more than 800$. So you pay for quality here.
Sounds like a mistake a native Russian speaker would make :).
You chose the worst possible example. Extreme margins mask the issue.
At equilibrium, the price equals the marginal cost; sure, it is more than the average cost, but I can't see why the latter is relevant.
And the effort required to earn the money to buy the ring is also wasted.
No, it's not. You have produced (hopefully) valuable goods or services; why they are wasted, from the viewpoint of society?
Is a 3 minute song worse, somehow, than a 10 minute song? or a song that plays forever, on a loop, like the soundtrack at Pirates of the Caribbean, is that somehow even better?
The value of a life is more about quality than quantity, although presumably if quality is high, longer is more desirable, at least to a point.
You could argue with current overpopulation is is unethical to have any children. In which case your genes will be deselected from the gene pool, in favor of those of my children, so it's maybe not a good argument to make.
Meh, I don't have any special attachment to my genes, and I think that those who do should reconsider. After all, why we should? It's not an upload or anything like that, just a special set of dna code which resembles me only very vaguely.
What's the good if they are transmitted instead of some other set of genes?
So - there's probably no good reason for you - as a mind - to care about your genes, unless you have reason to believe they are unique or somehow superior in some way to the rest of the population.
But as a genetic machine, you "should" care deeply, for a very particular definition of "should" - simply because if you do not, and that turns out to have been genetically related, then yours will indeed die out. The constant urge and competition to reproduce your particular set of genes is what drives evolution (well, that and some other stuff like mutations). I like what evolution has come up with so far, and so it behooves me to help it along.
On a more practical note - I take a great deal of joy from my kids. I see in them echoes of people who are no longer with us, and it's delightful when they echo back things I have taught them, and even moreso when they come up with something totally unexpected. Barring transhumanism, your kids and your influence upon them are one of the only ways to extend your influence past death. My mother died over a decade ago - and I see elements of her personality in my daughters, and it's comforting.
I don't hold a lot of hope for eternal life for myself - I'm 48 and not in the greatest health, and I am not what the people on this board would consider optimistic about technology saving my mentation when by body fails, by any means (and I dearly would love to be wrong, but until that happens, you plan for the worst). But - I think there's a strong possibility my daughters will live forever. And that is extremely comforting. The spectre of death is greatly lessened when you think there is a good chance that things you love will live on after you, remembering, maybe forever.
Ahah, no, no particular reason, to the contrary, they're not especially good, and I am in favor of eugenetics (applied to those who do not exist yet, not those who are already alive!).
Yes, I understand the argument, and that probably that's exactly what will happen. On the other side, I feel no special loss pondering that the human genetic pool in the future will be composed by this or that sequence of adenosine and citosine.
I think that's a cognitive illusion, but I understand that it can generate positive emotions who are not an illusion, by any means.
I understand that having kids, as much as unethical I think it is (that is, mildly), still generates for the way that some are built, some very strong good emotions, and those are not at all unethical.
Everyone has to balance the two, I guess.
More a legacy kind of consideration, really - I do not imagine any meaningful part of myself other than genes (which frankly I was just borrowing) live on. But - If I have done my job right, the attitudes and morals that I have should be reflected in my children, and so I have an effect on the world in some small way that lingers, even if I am not around to see it. And yes - that's comforting, a bit. Still would rather not die, but hey.
"I think that's a cognitive illusion..." No one has yet shown that personal identity consists in anything other than self-identification, i.e. that I happen to consider myself the same person as 10 years ago and expect in 10 years to be someone who believes himself to have had my past. If that is the case, there is no reason for a person not to self-identify with anyone he wants, as for example his own descendants (cf. Scott Alexander's post). In this way there is no more and no less cognitive illusion in wanting to live on through one's descendants than in wanting to be physically immortal.
I just tried to consider myself as being the coffee cup in front of me, but I can't seem to manage it. Then I tried considering myself to be the chap who lives next door, but that doesn't work either. There seems to be a certain ineluctability about my identification with this body and this mind which is left unaccounted for by sticking onto it XML tags saying <merely-happen-to>.
Yes, there are reasons why you consider yourself the same as some particular person and not another. That doesn't prevent other people from having other reasons for considering themselves identified with other bodies, as for example people who believe in reincarnation. Their belief may be less natural than yours, but it is neither more nor less objective (i.e. neither belief has anything objective about it, at least as far as we can tell.)
Some people justify claims of reincarnation by claiming to remember past lives, not merely to "identify with" them. The belief does have something objective about it: it can be tested. Such claims have generally failed of substantiation.
In short, my reasons are objectively good; theirs are objectively bad. What do you mean by "less natural", if not this?
I said their belief was "less natural" because human nature is more inclined to your kind of belief (thus it is universal) than to their kind of belief (which is much less universal.) However, whether the reasons in question are good or bad, they are subjective in both cases.
You seem to be supportive of cryonics (e.g. in this comment). Are you in favor of cryonics in the case that you are revived as an upload? If so, what makes you think the upload would be you, rather than "this body", which would be dead?
What odds would you place on your genes being responsible for your sense of responsibility for overpopulation?
Uhm...
I'd say < 0.1%, considering that almost no other sets of genes (aka "people") seems bent on controlling the expansion of the human population, and I don't suppose my genes are somewhat special. Plus, that would imply that genes 'care' somehow about the group of humans as a whole, which they definitely don't.
Although the extent to which my genes determine the shape of my mind is an interesting angle. Not enough cogent to revert my original point, since it's clear that who I am today is also the result of > 30 years of experiences and cognition, but it's an interesting point to consider: should I value more people who are more like me?
I don't have an answer at the moment.
"Your genes are responsible for X" is ambiguous because that statement may or may not imply a certain amount of directness. My genes are responsible for the fact that I have a driver's license, in the sense that if I had the genes of a wombat, I wouldn't have a driver's license, but that's not what most people would mean by that.
Not for that reason, but I do think that it's unethical right now because of overpopulation.
Whatever resources they consume are not going to impoverish anyone else. Maybe it would if they were being allocated on an international basis, but that's a silly thing to expect. (On the other hand, I do agree it is unethical in places like Egypt or Bangladesh).
I think I read something different from what you really meant, because that's not true by the very definition of resource.
I don't think it's silly, in the sense that the future will see a lessening of national borders and national exploitation of resources.
There are already strong immigration/emigration fluxes, and the future is probably going to bring about an increase in population, less and less arable land due to global warming, and the global resources of oil, coltan, uranium and the like are obviously thinning.
I don't feel these predictions come from a dystopic novel, they are logical extrapolations of the trends already happening: if something big (e.g. AI) doesn't happen in this century, that is the most likely scenario.
I meant items like food, water, appliances, etc. Otherwise, yes, we're down to a semantic quibble over what "resource" means, which I don't think is very helpful.
Certainly it is. If there are not enough resources to keep seven billion people at a reasonable standard of living, what possible incentive is there to share?
Let me just leave this here.
Kids have got along fine so far.
I think maybe not if you sign them up for cryonic preservation?
I think it may be much more on point to talk about it being unethical to have children pre-singularity, for the inevitable needless suffering that will occur. I do believe that the moment we solve aging, it is a moral imperative to stop having children until we can be assure that we're not bringing new people into existence just to suffer.
I don't think it is unethical to keep having children today, but only so far as it is necessary to actually reach the singularity. I think ethically, we should be trying to minimize the portion of human mind-space that must experience pre-singularity existence, but not to the point of delaying the singularity.
Cryonics also has what Aschwin de Wolf calls the Cryonics and Something Else (CASE) problem. Many of the older cryonicists connected the cryonics idea with Ayn Rand's philosophy, postwar libertarianism and space colonization ideas from the 1970's. Younger people look at these Something Elses linked to cryonics and don't understand the appeal of these Baby Boomer fads. I would like to see cryonics disengage from the nerd enthusiasms of the day and become a strictly practical experimental medical technology that anyone can avail himself of without having to accept a lot of unnecessary baggage along with it.
Children of cryonicists have a record of dropping their cryopreservation arrangements when they become adults.
You would expect this from reversion to the mean.
If everyone did that, there's a non-negligible chance the human race will die out before bringing about a Singularity. I care about a reasonably nice society with nebulous traits that I value existing, so I consider that a bad outcome. But I do worry about whether it's right to have children who may well posess my far-higher-than-average (or simply higher than most people are willing to admit?) aversion to death.
(If under reflection, someone would prefer not to become immortal if they had the chance, then their preference is by far the most important consideration. So if I knew my future kids wouldn't be too fazed by their own future deaths, I'd be fine with bringing them into the world.)
I'm not saying everyone should do it. I'm maybe saying that there are too many people in the world already who are in senseless danger.
On the other hand, it might be ethical to have children that will be more rational and useful than 99% of the rest.