I don’t understand this argument. It says that if only people who want to have children reproduce, future generations may be incapable of choosing not to reproduce? And thus people who don’t want to reproduce should do so anyway to preserve the ability of future generations to …choose not to reproduce?
It also depends on how likely you think there is to be a “very long term”. I think it’s plausible that standard evolution won’t matter much in the long term because we’ll either be wiped out or reproduction will be very different.
The issue isn’t strictly the choice not to reproduce, but choice-space generally; our brains are fairly complex, and anything that compresses one choice is probably going to compress others. I don’t pretend to know the shortest path to increased reproduction, but as a general rule of thumb, genes are ambivalent towards the interests of their hosts. There are more ways for the shortest path to be bad for us than to be good (from the perspective of our current interests); the least-bad imaginable case for me is that it might simply increase sex drives earlier in our adolescence, when we’re more prone to making bad decisions.
Plausible, certainly, but I wouldn’t stake anything on it. I don’t know what priors to assign, particularly since I think the doomsday argument ignores the anthropic principle. I therefore act assuming that things will proceed according to historic norms. (Now, if I had a strong disutility from engendering children, I might weigh things differently. However, since I came to the conclusion that I should have children, I’ve decided that I want them. So a utility-neutral decision became a utility-positive one. Some biases have advantages.)
I don’t understand this argument. It says that if only people who want to have children reproduce, future generations may be incapable of choosing not to reproduce? And thus people who don’t want to reproduce should do so anyway to preserve the ability of future generations to …choose not to reproduce?
It also depends on how likely you think there is to be a “very long term”. I think it’s plausible that standard evolution won’t matter much in the long term because we’ll either be wiped out or reproduction will be very different.
The issue isn’t strictly the choice not to reproduce, but choice-space generally; our brains are fairly complex, and anything that compresses one choice is probably going to compress others. I don’t pretend to know the shortest path to increased reproduction, but as a general rule of thumb, genes are ambivalent towards the interests of their hosts. There are more ways for the shortest path to be bad for us than to be good (from the perspective of our current interests); the least-bad imaginable case for me is that it might simply increase sex drives earlier in our adolescence, when we’re more prone to making bad decisions.
Plausible, certainly, but I wouldn’t stake anything on it. I don’t know what priors to assign, particularly since I think the doomsday argument ignores the anthropic principle. I therefore act assuming that things will proceed according to historic norms. (Now, if I had a strong disutility from engendering children, I might weigh things differently. However, since I came to the conclusion that I should have children, I’ve decided that I want them. So a utility-neutral decision became a utility-positive one. Some biases have advantages.)