Side note: I can't really tell, but some evidence suggests the total time spent on childcare has increased in the past 40-50 years. Now, when I look at people raised back then and try to adjust for the effects of leaded gasoline on the brain, they seem pretty much OK. So we should consider the possibility that we're putting pointless pressure on mothers.

There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don't make it though natural selection.

Really? The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children. And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.

Humans, oddly enough, seem to have evolved adaptations for ensuring that people have unplanned pregnancies in spite of their big brains. Human females don't have an obvious estrus cycle, their fertile periods are often unpredictable, and each individual act of copulation has a relatively low chance of causing a pregnancy. As a result, humans are often willing to have sex when they don't want children and end up having them anyway.

A nitpick:

Analogically, steelmanning Reactionary ideas is bad for modelling Reactionaries

This doesn't follow. Many reactionaries are either intimately involved in LW culture or are sympathetic towards it, so an LW member trying to model a reactionary is probably doing a much better job than a Roman modeling Obama.

So what you are doing right now is rationalizing.

Why would you think I didn't do such analyses before having children? Children didn't "just happen" to me, for me to justify their existence ex post facto. (This is a good example of the "most people in general" being a bad rule of thumb when dealing with a highly selected subgroup of dubious but cool disposition.)

three aspects of parenting that I suspect are the main reasons why people choose to have kids or not: the financial case, the moral case, and the practical case

None of these are reasons to choose to have kids; they are all reasons not to. That is, even if you refute them, you still haven't made a positive case.

This brings up the issue of whether or not you "owe" your child an all expenses paid college education. I wouldn't rule out only paying partially for your child's college education especially since this calculation assumes only one child. I would be interested to hear more thoughts on this matter.

I don't feel obligated to provide any college tuition to any of my children; I certainly haven't ruled it out, but to have had their prospective existence hinge on going to a college or not seems to wildly exagerate the importance of a college degree.

I also tend to think the other financial costs of having a child are overblown due to a desire for convenience or status (that is, there are cheaper ways of doing things that may not signal high status, but that is true of everything really)

LW is a US-centric site. When I saw the option, I assumed it meant the US interpretation of the "conservative" label, which (from Europe) seems impossible to distinguish from batshit crazy.

As a US conservative, I can assure you the feeling is mutual, BTW.

It's possible.

Why are you bringing it up, though? As an aspiring rationalist, I believe it should be possible in principle to discuss whether one sex is more rational than the other, on average. However, it makes me feel uncomfortable that a considerable number of people here feel the need to inject the topic into a conversation where it's not really relevant. If I were a woman, I can imagine I would feel more hesitant to participate on Less Wrong as a result of this, and that would be a pity.

I don't think we disagree.

To clarify, I suspect most neurotypical humans may possess features of ethical development which map reasonably well to the notion of terminal values, although we don't know their details (if we did, we'd be most of the way to solving ethics) or the extent to which they're shared. I also believe that almost everyone who professes some particular terminal (fundamental, immutable) value is wrong, as evidenced by the fact that these not infrequently change.

I think political differences come down to values moreso than beliefs about facts.

Sometimes it is difficult to find out what is the different value and what is essentially the same value but different models.

For example two people can have a value of "it would be bad to destroy humanity", but one of them has a model that humanity will likely destroy itself with ongoing capitalism, while the other has a model that humanity would be likely destroyed by some totalitarian movement like communism.

But instead of openly discussing their models and finding the difference, the former will accuse the latter of not caring about human suffering, and the latter will accuse the former of not caring about human suffering. Or they will focus on different applause lights, just to emphasise how different they are.

I probably underestimate the difference of values. Some people are psychopaths; and they might not be the only different group of people. But it seems to me that a lot of political mindkilling is connected with overestimating the difference, instead of admitting that our values in connection with a different model of the world would lead to different decisions. (Because our values are good, the different decisions are evil, and good cannot be evil, right?)

Just imagine that you would have a certain proof (by observing parallel universes, or by simulations done by superhuman AI) that e.g. a tolerance of homosexuality inevitably leads to a destruction of civilization, or that every civilization that invents nanotechnology inevitably destroys itself in nanotechnological wars unless the whole planet is united under rule of the communist party. If you had a good reason to believe these models, what would your values make you do?

(And more generally: If you meet a person with strange political opinions, try to imagine a least convenient world, where your values would lead to the same opinions. Even if that would be a wrong model of our world, it still may be the model the other person believes to be correct.)

Interestingly, I saw on article on the topic of micronutrients and hunger just a few days ago here. He cites two studies on multivitamins that show in one case no impact on appetite, and in another case an increase in fasting desire to eat but no impact on hunger, fullness, or prospective food consumption. With respect to the relative micronutrient levels of low-carb vs. low-fat diets it depends critically on the composition of such diets, and all of the studies that I've seen comparing them have a complete profile, as far as I can remember.