The part about especially valuable children was two sentences and meant as a response to a potential objection, not as my main point. Parents in general are getting the kudos in this story, not just parents raising some hypothetical super-babies. [...] I do think the intellectual case for this is strong.
In a world where we worry about overpopulation the case you brought is extremely weak. If you look at a previous discussion on the issue on LW there are two sides: “(1) Overpopulation is one of the most important issues and we have to do more to fight it. (2) We can be confident that the problem solves itself over time.”
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why. The only way to fix this is to assume that you aren’t really meaning that you want more overpopulation and instead advocate that specific people should procreate.
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
You might say that the human population as a whole is already breeding at more than replacement level and so any suggestion that someone should have children is de facto an encouragement to overpopulate more. I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Alice: It would be nice if you drove to the store and picked up the cake for birthday.
Bob: You are basically claiming that we need more carbon in the atmosphere without providing arguments why. In a world where we worry about global warming the case you brought is extremely weak.
Alice: ???
Bob may well have a point but Alice is understandably confused.
When I wrote my post I anticipated the counterarguments against it and prepared answers for them. But no-one has even brought those counterarguments yet—everyone’s talking about other things. What I think has happened is that I severely underestimated the inferential distance between my position and that of the typical reader. The great illusionist strikes again. I’ll present this very differently next time.
There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
Policy are supposed to get judged by real world effects. If we want a certain number of new humans those people who want to go through the experience of childbearing should start producing children. In the present world those already produce too much children, so there no case of the people who don’t want to produce, to produce.
I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Giving that you do point to the quasi-racistic stuff you are basically holding the position that not everyone should get children but that the right people should as Mestroyer said.
In that case you just disagree with him about who the right people happen to be. He thinks it’s about being intelligent and the type of person who goes on lesswrong while you might also want more of stupid people that share your racial identification.
Without restricting the arguments to being about the right people getting more children the case is easily dismissed in a world with overpopulation. In the spirit of fixing the arguments of other people it makes sense to treat you as saying that you want the right people getting more children even if you don’t explicitly say so.
Gah, no, that’s not it at all. It feels like we’re moving farther, rather than closer, to understanding each other’s position.
I seem to have irreparably placed us on a wrong track with my post so I think I’ll stop trying to recover from it. To make progress it would be best to start again from the ground up with a completely different write-up of my core idea. But for now, at least, I’ll let this rest.
In a world where we worry about overpopulation the case you brought is extremely weak. If you look at a previous discussion on the issue on LW there are two sides: “(1) Overpopulation is one of the most important issues and we have to do more to fight it. (2) We can be confident that the problem solves itself over time.”
You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why. The only way to fix this is to assume that you aren’t really meaning that you want more overpopulation and instead advocate that specific people should procreate.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. There is nothing in my post or my subsequent comments about needing to increase the population. We don’t need new humans because we have too few humans—we need new humans because old humans die.
You might say that the human population as a whole is already breeding at more than replacement level and so any suggestion that someone should have children is de facto an encouragement to overpopulate more. I do have particular counterarguments to that (including the quasi-racist stuff you’d expect) but it’s also just a turn in the conversation I didn’t anticipate at all.
Alice: It would be nice if you drove to the store and picked up the cake for birthday. Bob: You are basically claiming that we need more carbon in the atmosphere without providing arguments why. In a world where we worry about global warming the case you brought is extremely weak. Alice: ???
Bob may well have a point but Alice is understandably confused.
When I wrote my post I anticipated the counterarguments against it and prepared answers for them. But no-one has even brought those counterarguments yet—everyone’s talking about other things. What I think has happened is that I severely underestimated the inferential distance between my position and that of the typical reader. The great illusionist strikes again. I’ll present this very differently next time.
(Btw, I didn’t downvote you.)
Policy are supposed to get judged by real world effects. If we want a certain number of new humans those people who want to go through the experience of childbearing should start producing children. In the present world those already produce too much children, so there no case of the people who don’t want to produce, to produce.
Giving that you do point to the quasi-racistic stuff you are basically holding the position that not everyone should get children but that the right people should as Mestroyer said.
In that case you just disagree with him about who the right people happen to be. He thinks it’s about being intelligent and the type of person who goes on lesswrong while you might also want more of stupid people that share your racial identification.
Without restricting the arguments to being about the right people getting more children the case is easily dismissed in a world with overpopulation. In the spirit of fixing the arguments of other people it makes sense to treat you as saying that you want the right people getting more children even if you don’t explicitly say so.
Gah, no, that’s not it at all. It feels like we’re moving farther, rather than closer, to understanding each other’s position.
I seem to have irreparably placed us on a wrong track with my post so I think I’ll stop trying to recover from it. To make progress it would be best to start again from the ground up with a completely different write-up of my core idea. But for now, at least, I’ll let this rest.