I've occasionally tried teaching programming to novices, which is one incredible lesson in illusion of transparency, maybe even better than playing Zendo.

How typical do you think your experience has been in this regard? IME, teaching programming to complete novice has been cruise-control stuff and one of the relatively few things where I know exactly what's going on and where I'm going within minutes of starting.

For context: I've had success in teaching a complete novice with vague memory of high-school-math usage of variables how to go from that to writing his own VB6 scripts to automate simple tasks, of retrieving and sending data to fields on a screen using predetermined native functions in the scripting engine (which I taught him how to search and learn-to-use from the available and comprehensive reference files). This was on maybe my third or fourth attempt at doing so.

What I actually want to know is how typical my experience is, and whether or not there's value in analyzing what I did in order to share it. I suspect I may have a relatively rare mental footing, perspective and interaction of skillsets in regards to this, but I may be wrong and/or this may be more common than I think, invalidating it as evidence for the former.

How stable is gene-to-protein translation in a relatively identical medium? I.e. if we abstract away all the issues with RNA and somehow neutralize any interfering products from elsewhere, will a gene sequence always produce the same protein, and always produce it, whenever encountered at as specific place? Or is there something deeper where changes to the logic in some other, unrelated part of the DNA could directly affect the way this gene is expressed (i.e. not through their protein interfering with this one)?

Or maybe I don't understand enough to even formulate the right question here. Or perhaps this subject simply hasn't been researched and analyzed enough to give an answer to the above yet?

If the answer is simple, are there any known ratios and reliability rates?

There's no particular hidden question; I'm not asking about designer babies or gengineered foodstuffs or anything like that. I'm academically curious about the fundamentals of DNA and genetic expression (and any comparison between this and programming, which I understand better, would be very nice), but hopelessly out of my depth and under-informed, to the point where I can't even understand research papers or the ones they cite or the ones that those cite, and the only things I understand properly are by-order-of-historical-discovery-style textbooks (like traditional physics textbooks) that teach things that were obsolete long before my parents were born.

I've always been curious to see the response of someone with this view to the question:

What if you knew, as much as any things about the events of the world are known, that there will be circumstances in X years that make it impossible for any child you conceive to possibly take care of you when you are older?

In such a hypothetical, is the executive drive to have children still present, still being enforced by the programming of Azathoth, merely disconnected from the original trigger that made you specifically have this drive? Or does the desire go away? Or something else, maybe something I haven't thought of (I hope it is!)?

(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who's thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there's no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):

and I don't know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.

I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it's understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social 'success' and 'benefit'.

Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)

Agree with the rest, so not much further to add, except for:

What seems to particularly rub people the wrong way is my suggestion that this is morally obligatory. While my views have not shifted greatly I've learned enough from this trainwreck of a post to argue this position less stridently next time around.

Yes. The mostly-utilitarian environment around LW already doesn't support moral obligations, but on top of that due to the various issues surrounding moral systems it's frowned upon, partially due to the large risk of inducing conflict and confusion, to directly assert a claim like this that results from an assumed moral system.

Even though it seems like the majority of LW would "support" it, a post made entirely about encouraging people and justifying a case for the point that it should be morally obligatory for everyone to make expected utility calculations in a trolley problem and push down the fat man would not be that well received, I think.

An approach that, I think, would be much easier on this same subject with intellectual communities, particularly LessWrong, would be to claim that your point of argument (People X "should" have children!) contributes more towards some goal (Higher ratio of quality humans?) than alternatives, and is thus closer to optimal in that regards (if you claim something as truly optimal without any caveats and an extremely high probability, you damn well have the durasteel-solid math to prove it, or you deserve every criticism and tomato thrown your way! not that I'm guiltless of this myself).

EDIT: And to complete the last thougth above, which I thought I had written: And in most intellectual communities, the gap between "closer to optimal" and "moral obligation" is then easier to cross if one really wants to insist on this point. Arguments could be made that any sub-optimal is harm by opportunity costs, or about the relations of individuals' utility functions to social factors and thus to their behavior towards these "moral obligations", or various other ethics thinghies. Basically, it's just a more stable platform and a better meeting point for launching into a pitch on this subject.

This seems worth adding to a list somewhere or making a more elaborate article about. Anyone?

At least, the label "equal treatment fallacy" seems like it represents well enough most cases and, with those examples, evokes a clear picture. It doesn't seem to refer to all "variable vs constant" issues following this pattern, but close enough.

Adjusted for the rates of decline of human population if only a subset of the population ceases creating new humans and the time this gives us until we dip past the civilization-sustaining threshold, then yes, there exists a relatively large subset of humans where the equations balance out to the researchers having enough time to develop anti-aging technology before we reach the deadline.

How large is "large", and exactly how much time that represents, and which exact conditions define the subset of humans, are all yet to be determined (if I knew, I'd take over the world and make it happen!), but I'm rather confident that the number of such humans we could affort to put on Deathward duty is significantly higher than you've previously assumed.

(Partially leaning on the knowledge that human brains tend to fart out and underestimate severely when estimating the impact of large numbers like "6 billion", which you seem to have currently placed on the side where it would increase the number of quality-adjusted humans we produce and, thereby, the time we have until humanfall. )

.That was an awesome answer, which leaves me with very little to add. I'll merely say that—as you've already implicitly predicted—what seems to be going on is that my nature/nurture priors are significantly different from yours and this leads us to such different conclusions.

And there's the satisfying conclusion. Our priors are uneven, but we agree on the evidence and our predictions. We can now safely adjourn or move on to a more elaborate discussion about our respective priors.

As an important data point, my wordgaming experiments rarely work out this well, but so far have retained net positive expected utility (as do, unsurprisingly, most efforts at improving social skills). I'll bump up this tactic a few notches on my mental list.

I cannot.

My time is limited by way of requiring to spend >50 hours / wk on a "self-sustainment" job, a restriction which would only be emboldened by the additional monetary requirements of human-making. The rest of my time can only be alotted to cool projects or human-making; I can not achieve both in sufficient quality to go past the treshold of a failed effort if my available time and resources are divided between the two. One or the other will fail, and probably both if I attempt a standard distribution of resources.

I suspect that many are in similar situations.

(Your point might still stand in a more general case; I've simply attempted to turn it from a discussion of arguments and options to a discussion about ratios of numbers of people matching categories of life situations.)

Why? I'm assuming this is some sort of sarcasm rather than an honest request, but please clarify if this is not the case. If it was sarcasm, what was it motivated by?

The possible interpretation as sarcasm was intentional; the phrasing was intended to trigger a game board favorable to me in game-theoretic terms (i.e. provoke a "catch-22" where I win, in simple terms):

• If you take my request seriously or otherwise do ignore me, I'm instinctively and emotionally content in the knowledge that I've uselessly thrown words at someone on the Internet I disagree with, which is something I've done many times before and am now comfortable with. The less reasonable parts of my brain are satisfied that you've done as I said, that I'm in control and not socially at risk. The more reasonable parts... well, acceptable expected utility gamble which happened to result in a minor negative outcome instead of a minor positive one, and I still got my initial entertainment and mental exercise from writing the comment.

• If you take it as sarcasm or as some sort of challenge and decide to engage with me in an intellectual discussion about the game-theoretic issues, the cost analyses, or even just why you think these particular issues are more relevant and important and others can be discarded, then I've made progress and we're now in a more interesting (for me) part of the discussion where I believe we are closer to a satisfying conclusion.

Of course, I was somewhat betting that one of those two would be chosen, at some risk of unexpected divergence. Possibly also at some cost to you in the form of ego hit or something. However, unexpected divergences include this one, where you ask me about my choice of words, and I believe this is of positive value. To be honest, writing the above was quite fun. Plus you simultaneously went for one of those favorable options. Quite a success.

Now on to the actual topic at hand:

Various use-of-words arguments could be made regarding the non-volunteer versus volunteer aspects of human-making and other socially-beneficial endeavors, but more interesting and is the point about effective children-farming: Effective to what metric?

My mental model of Quality-Adjusted New Humans takes a few high-quality humans randomly spawned in a large number of new humans all living in a ceteris paribus better environment to be far superior to a marginally higher high-low new human quality ratio in a lower quality environment. As such, I think it's more efficient and beneficial to have experts focus on improving the environment at the expense of this low amount of potential parents being lost.

In practice, the above translates to: First-world, educated, high-quality people such as might be expected to participate on LW would benefit society more if they focus on creating a better society for the new humans to grow in, as opposed to adding a marginal number of high-expected-quality-adjusted-new-humans.

Which all probably relates to my priors about the impacts of Nature VS Nurture and my priors about the cost-benefits of one high-quality human versus many low-quality humans.

And on the other end of the inference chain, this leads to my conclusion that we should not recommend that LW participants and other audience members focus on producing children, with the corollary (but separate) points about where I do think they should focus their efforts.