And if the philosophically correct thing to do for smart people is to not have children, then the incentive gradient will forever be such that there can’t be very many people who understand and act on abstract reasoning.
Why does that matter? It would only matter to smart people if they cared about there being a lot of smart people, in which case they might have already convinced themselves to have children for the obvious reasons. On the other hand if they don’t care about there being a lot of smart people, they won’t find your argument persuasive.
Thank you for raising this point. The argument would also matter to smart people if they cared about their own intelligence. If the population average is pegged to a low level, even the outliers are much less smart in absolute scales. As for why it would matter to you when your intelligence is already settled, see updateless decision theory.
Why does that matter? It would only matter to smart people if they cared about there being a lot of smart people, in which case they might have already convinced themselves to have children for the obvious reasons. On the other hand if they don’t care about there being a lot of smart people, they won’t find your argument persuasive.
Thank you for raising this point. The argument would also matter to smart people if they cared about their own intelligence. If the population average is pegged to a low level, even the outliers are much less smart in absolute scales. As for why it would matter to you when your intelligence is already settled, see updateless decision theory.
You need more work than saying “updateless decision theory” to get that argument to work. Make the model and the correlations clear and explicit.
I understand why some people follow a decision theory that works that way, but I do not.