Real-world personal finance isn’t much of a red queen race. It costs an almost fixed amount of money to stay alive each year, and an almost fixed amount of money to raise a child to adulthood. If you make over $100k a year, you can comfortably raise at least one child and spend any excess money or effort on charity.
We’re probably not in a timeframe where evolution will matter. There are several existential risks and several technologies that render evolution obsolete that are likely to occur before most lesswrong readers would normally die. Having children for evolutionary purposes doesn’t seem like an effective strategy for promoting altruism.
We’re not at a stage of popularity where raising a child to hopefully agree with us to be charitable 25 years from now is a more viable memetic strategy than spending the years that would be spent child-rearing trying to coax people into taking off their earmuffs. Which in turn may be less efficient than just putting your nose to the grindstone and making a proof of concept child-saving robot to show off and use.
The camera crew and autobiography strategy is the one Peter Singer personally uses.
#1. It’s not the money, it’s the time which goes by and leaves the “you” forever alone on the roadside.
#2. Having children is not aimed to support any ideology besides having children.
#1, 2, 3 : you are correct in absolute terms in that probably the world has changed and you are probably correct.
Still, #1 : you can use that over $100k funds to shift the probability more for your kids, even if the gains are very marginal, our firmware says to do it.
#2: You’re right, but our firmware is programmed to ignore this possibility.
#3: You’re right, but our firmware says that our own child is worth a lot more than other people’s. As long as ours doesn’t drown in pools, screw everyone else.
One thing your thought experiment points out is the difference between what humans claim to care about “I don’t want any children to starve or drown in pools” to what they actually care about. Because obviously everyone walking with headphones on is doing it because they really don’t give a shit, they just said they did to fit in.
Another thing I might note: you gave children drowning in pools as the analogy but the real boogeyman, aging, is going to affect everyone walking by oblivious. They all would personally benefit if they collectively worked together sufficiently on methods to slow and reverse it.
Maybe ignore the below ramble
Part of the issue here is that the current roadblocks in biomedical progress—the recent mRNA vaccines are an example of what is possible when the funds and roadblocks are temporarily removed—have made my prior for “any further progress at all” to be assumed to be none.
I am still kind of imagining a world where I am 95 and there is still no treatment for Parkinson’s, an ineffective treatment for dementias (so if I see the world at 95 it’s due to luck), and barely any better cancer treatments as well. If we subtract 60 years from the present day, 1961, this is basically true. It’s an observation of historical fact.
This is why AI (and exponentially more intelligence) is our best personal hope. To get through these red tapes and roadblocks you would basically need to be superhuman. (because AI can fill out forms for free, design experiments for the maximum knowledge gain within ethical constraints, perform and analyze the results of thousands of experiments in parallel, read every science journal article published to set up priors, and so on).
Real-world personal finance isn’t much of a red queen race. It costs an almost fixed amount of money to stay alive each year, and an almost fixed amount of money to raise a child to adulthood. If you make over $100k a year, you can comfortably raise at least one child and spend any excess money or effort on charity.
We’re probably not in a timeframe where evolution will matter. There are several existential risks and several technologies that render evolution obsolete that are likely to occur before most lesswrong readers would normally die. Having children for evolutionary purposes doesn’t seem like an effective strategy for promoting altruism.
We’re not at a stage of popularity where raising a child to hopefully agree with us to be charitable 25 years from now is a more viable memetic strategy than spending the years that would be spent child-rearing trying to coax people into taking off their earmuffs. Which in turn may be less efficient than just putting your nose to the grindstone and making a proof of concept child-saving robot to show off and use.
The camera crew and autobiography strategy is the one Peter Singer personally uses.
#1. It’s not the money, it’s the time which goes by and leaves the “you” forever alone on the roadside. #2. Having children is not aimed to support any ideology besides having children.
#1, 2, 3 : you are correct in absolute terms in that probably the world has changed and you are probably correct.
Still, #1 : you can use that over $100k funds to shift the probability more for your kids, even if the gains are very marginal, our firmware says to do it.
#2: You’re right, but our firmware is programmed to ignore this possibility.
#3: You’re right, but our firmware says that our own child is worth a lot more than other people’s. As long as ours doesn’t drown in pools, screw everyone else.
One thing your thought experiment points out is the difference between what humans claim to care about “I don’t want any children to starve or drown in pools” to what they actually care about. Because obviously everyone walking with headphones on is doing it because they really don’t give a shit, they just said they did to fit in.
Another thing I might note: you gave children drowning in pools as the analogy but the real boogeyman, aging, is going to affect everyone walking by oblivious. They all would personally benefit if they collectively worked together sufficiently on methods to slow and reverse it.
Maybe ignore the below ramble
Part of the issue here is that the current roadblocks in biomedical progress—the recent mRNA vaccines are an example of what is possible when the funds and roadblocks are temporarily removed—have made my prior for “any further progress at all” to be assumed to be none.
I am still kind of imagining a world where I am 95 and there is still no treatment for Parkinson’s, an ineffective treatment for dementias (so if I see the world at 95 it’s due to luck), and barely any better cancer treatments as well. If we subtract 60 years from the present day, 1961, this is basically true. It’s an observation of historical fact.
This is why AI (and exponentially more intelligence) is our best personal hope. To get through these red tapes and roadblocks you would basically need to be superhuman. (because AI can fill out forms for free, design experiments for the maximum knowledge gain within ethical constraints, perform and analyze the results of thousands of experiments in parallel, read every science journal article published to set up priors, and so on).
To control biology it’s what we need.