I don’t think any of that follows. My personal change in opinion was this:
“Hm, shit, I’d better have kids.” That was pretty much it.
What makes you think any of those conclusions are likely? They sound more like beliefs you already held, as suggested by the fact that all of them except for the last are, apparently, laudable, which you found reason to reinforce in genetics.
For example, animal rights. How does it follow that we should have greater empathy for other animals just because they’re made of the same stuff as we are? I could see an opposing realization that animals are directly competing with us, and therefore fair game.
Don’t let evolution define your utility function. It got you here, but you decide where you go from now. Will having kids produce effects you actually want, or will it just continue the pattern of evolution?
Of course, we evolved to enjoy things that help us pass on genes, like butter and cute kids, and pursuing enjoyment seems fine. But only if you really enjoy those things, not just because it spreads your genes.
Robin Hanson posed an argument in a post I can’t hunt down that choosing not to have children disadvantages genes which permit that choice over the very long term. It’s possible there are genetic reasons this line of argument may lead nowhere—there may be no genes at all which can have any impact on that choice, for example, or those genes may confer benefits which outweigh these costs. But for now I am convinced by this line of argument.
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 guess this more comes into coming to terms with my own mortality. A full appreciation of your own brevity and insignificance is a bit of a shock to your system (I’m reminded of Douglas Adams’s total perspective vortex), and as a pair they feel like such game-changing ideas that they should have a significant effect on my thinking. It feels like a change of such enormity that something is wrong if it doesn’t result in a lot of rethinking, hence my coming here to discuss the implications when I realised I was just carrying on as before.
As for animal rights I am inclined to agree and not place a high priorirty on preserving species (you’ll be able to clone another before long, right?), but I never really thought out the reasons why before (probably the cynical reason that I can get more out of preserving humans so I put a low price on other causes). Since I never had a clear idea why being less empathic towards animals was okay it felt like the revelation I’m not so different should make reconsider the issue. Again, my concern is it hasn’t, that I’m not updating myself.
I think you should account for it in figuring out the best course for the future; Robin Hanson’s argument that choosing not to have children could compress decision space in the far future resulted in me concluding that the long-term implications of choosing not to have children may be a bad thing, absent radical changes I do not feel safe including in my predictions.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should change your ethical system as a whole, unless your ethical system is dependent upon the mechanisms by which you came into being. Your consideration space is finite, so at some point it’s necessary to limit what you put into it.
Why? Also, by “have kids” do you mean start a family or donate sperm?
I could see an opposing realization that animals are directly competing with us, and therefore fair game.
Humans are even more directly competing with us. Are they more fair game?
If we value humans because humans are similar to us, and we find that animals are more similar than previously thought, it would follow that we would start valuing animals more.
If we value humans because humans are similar to us, and we find that animals are more similar than previously thought, it would follow that we would start valuing animals more.
If we are talking about kin selection, that doesn’t really follow—members of other species are very distantly related to us—and barely qualify as kin at all. Nor do they typically share memes with us—so their memetic relatedness with us is near zero as well.
Donating sperm is a lower-probability option, to be sure.
Humans don’t compete in zero-sum games, generally. If a particular human or set of humans forces me into a zero-sum competition, yes, they are fair game. In a choice between a mugger’s life and my money, I’m going to pick my money.
We already implement something like this with animals, which is why dogs and cats, who play a cooperative game with us, have more value than cows, with whom our relationship is closer to a synergistic low-sum game, which have more value in turn than coyotes or wolves. (In modern day, we rarely compete directly with coyotes and wolves, and they tend to get benefit from city folk from a halo effect from our affinity for dogs. Those who do compete with them rarely harbor such sentiments.)
I don’t think any of that follows. My personal change in opinion was this:
“Hm, shit, I’d better have kids.” That was pretty much it.
What makes you think any of those conclusions are likely? They sound more like beliefs you already held, as suggested by the fact that all of them except for the last are, apparently, laudable, which you found reason to reinforce in genetics.
For example, animal rights. How does it follow that we should have greater empathy for other animals just because they’re made of the same stuff as we are? I could see an opposing realization that animals are directly competing with us, and therefore fair game.
Don’t let evolution define your utility function. It got you here, but you decide where you go from now. Will having kids produce effects you actually want, or will it just continue the pattern of evolution?
Of course, we evolved to enjoy things that help us pass on genes, like butter and cute kids, and pursuing enjoyment seems fine. But only if you really enjoy those things, not just because it spreads your genes.
It’s probably a bit late for that!
Robin Hanson posed an argument in a post I can’t hunt down that choosing not to have children disadvantages genes which permit that choice over the very long term. It’s possible there are genetic reasons this line of argument may lead nowhere—there may be no genes at all which can have any impact on that choice, for example, or those genes may confer benefits which outweigh these costs. But for now I am convinced by this line of argument.
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 guess this more comes into coming to terms with my own mortality. A full appreciation of your own brevity and insignificance is a bit of a shock to your system (I’m reminded of Douglas Adams’s total perspective vortex), and as a pair they feel like such game-changing ideas that they should have a significant effect on my thinking. It feels like a change of such enormity that something is wrong if it doesn’t result in a lot of rethinking, hence my coming here to discuss the implications when I realised I was just carrying on as before.
As for animal rights I am inclined to agree and not place a high priorirty on preserving species (you’ll be able to clone another before long, right?), but I never really thought out the reasons why before (probably the cynical reason that I can get more out of preserving humans so I put a low price on other causes). Since I never had a clear idea why being less empathic towards animals was okay it felt like the revelation I’m not so different should make reconsider the issue. Again, my concern is it hasn’t, that I’m not updating myself.
I think you should account for it in figuring out the best course for the future; Robin Hanson’s argument that choosing not to have children could compress decision space in the far future resulted in me concluding that the long-term implications of choosing not to have children may be a bad thing, absent radical changes I do not feel safe including in my predictions.
However, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it should change your ethical system as a whole, unless your ethical system is dependent upon the mechanisms by which you came into being. Your consideration space is finite, so at some point it’s necessary to limit what you put into it.
Why? Also, by “have kids” do you mean start a family or donate sperm?
Humans are even more directly competing with us. Are they more fair game?
If we value humans because humans are similar to us, and we find that animals are more similar than previously thought, it would follow that we would start valuing animals more.
If we are talking about kin selection, that doesn’t really follow—members of other species are very distantly related to us—and barely qualify as kin at all. Nor do they typically share memes with us—so their memetic relatedness with us is near zero as well.
Donating sperm is a lower-probability option, to be sure.
Humans don’t compete in zero-sum games, generally. If a particular human or set of humans forces me into a zero-sum competition, yes, they are fair game. In a choice between a mugger’s life and my money, I’m going to pick my money.
We already implement something like this with animals, which is why dogs and cats, who play a cooperative game with us, have more value than cows, with whom our relationship is closer to a synergistic low-sum game, which have more value in turn than coyotes or wolves. (In modern day, we rarely compete directly with coyotes and wolves, and they tend to get benefit from city folk from a halo effect from our affinity for dogs. Those who do compete with them rarely harbor such sentiments.)