The tough part will be guarding against Goodhart's Law. I suspect that the current system of publications and grant money as an indicator of ability started out as an attempt to improve the efficiency of scientific progress and has by now been thoroughly Goodharted.

As Lumifer points out, tenure was intended to give productive scientists some protected time so they could think. However, the amount of hoops you jump through on the way to getting there puts you through the opposite of protected time so by the time you get tenure you've gotten jaded, cynical, and acquired some habits useful for academic survival but harmful to academic excellence.

I can offer advice on statistical analysis of data (frequentist, alas, still learning Bayesian methods myself so not ready to advise on that). Unfortunately, right now I have too little spare time to actually analyze it for you, but I can explain to you how you can tackle it using open source tools and try to point you toward further reading focused on the specific problem you're trying to solve. In the medium-future I hope to have my online data analysis app stable enough to post here, but this is not looking like the month when it will happen.

I can probably answer almost any question you have about the R language, many questions about the Shiny framework, and some questions about Javascript, PHP, and various flavors of SQL (though there are probably plenty LW-ers more knowledgeable than I on the latter three topics).

Also can advise on designing controlled animal experiments so that you won't regret painting yourself into a corner later, but I'm guessing there aren't many biologists here.

I apologize in advance for slow turnaround times. My schedule is pretty full of kids and work. :-/

PS: if your question is too lengthy to post here, just post it on the appropriate Stackexchange site and post the link here.

How typical does it need to be? We generally discount data more the further away from the present it is, for exactly this reason.

The time frames mentioned in the post were 50, 120, 200, 300 and 500 years. Over all of those scales I would expect significant technological advance.

Agreed that we should treat the chances of a non-singularity future as being significant, but even with no singularity technological advance is a normal part of our society. Bandersnatch can be right even if Jabberwock is wrong.

If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?

Note that in the late 19th century, many leading intellectuals followed a scientific/rationalist/atheist/utopian philosophy, socialism, which later turned out to be a horrible way to arrange society. See my article on this. (And it's not good enough to say that we're really rational, scientific, altruist, utilitarian, etc, in contrast to those people -- they thought the same.)

So, how might we find that all these ideas are massively wrong?

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.

Why do all people seem to assume that both parents should do equal shares of work, household and child care.

Mostly for political reasons, I guess.

The rational part is that one day the parents may get into conflict and instead of playing cooperatively they will start playing against each other. At that moment the one which focused last years on their professional skills will have an advantage against the one which focused on child care. Dividing the household and child care is the most simple (and most likely suboptimal) way to reduce this advantage.

Most significant is the time cost: Caring for four children doesn't cost you more time than caring for a single one (it is much more demanding though). It is therefor rational from a rational utilitarian point of view that some couples should have no children and some many.

In my opinion this is suboptimal in a similar way. Many people want to have their own biological children. I believe a better solution would be somewhere in a direction of caring for the children together. Somewhere between an extended family and a kindergarten; like a small private kindergarten where the parents are close friends with the caretakers. Sometimes the role of the caretaker can be changed, but it is not necessary for everyone to do it. If rationalists in some parts of the world are already moving to live closer together, this seems like a logical next step, if they decide to have children. With a critical mass of rationalists at some place we could probably invent some kind of a pyramid scheme, where the older children would take care of the younger children, so less adult supervision would be needed. This could be mixed with homeschooling, etc.

without regulation

Well, markets don't exist in a vacuum, of course, they need a reasonable framework of law and order. Just to start with you need property rights and the ability to enforce contracts.

tragedy of the commons, negative externalities, etc.

That's a different thing that doesn't have much to do with the markets ability to deal with resource scarcity.

You keep pointing out that markets are not Jesus and they don't automagically solve all humanity's problems. Yes, yes, of course, but no one is arguing that. We're talking about a fairly specific problem -- dealing with resource scarcity -- and you keep on bringing up how markets don't solve violence and pollution...

Why not?

I expect the population to reach a plateau and stabilize at some point. I do not expect that plateau to be the capacity level of the planet.