What motivates rationalists to have children? How much rational decision making is involved?
ETA: removed the unnecessary emotional anchor.
ETA2: I’m not asking this out of Spockness, I think I have a pretty good map of normal human drives. I’m asking because I want to know if people have actually looked into the benefits, costs and risks involved, and done explicit reasoning on the subject.
I wouldn’t dream of speaking for rationalists generally, but in order to provide a data point I’ll answer for myself. I have one child; my wife and I were ~35 years old when we decided to have one. I am by any reasonable definition a rationalist; my wife is intelligent and quite rational but not in any very strong sense a rationalist. Introspection is unreliable but is all I have. I think my motivations were something like the following.
Having children as a terminal value, presumably programmed in by Azathoth and the culture I’m immersed in. This shows up subjectively as a few different things: liking the idea of a dependent small person to love, wanting one’s family line to continue, etc.
Having children as a terminal value for other people I care about (notably spouse and parents).
I think I think it’s best for the fertility rate to be close to the replacement rate (i.e., about 2 in a prosperous modern society with low infant mortality), and I think I’ve got pretty good genes; overall fertility rate in the country I’m in is a little below replacement and while it’s fairly densely populated I don’t think it’s pathologically so, so for me to have at least one child and probably two is probably beneficial for society overall.
I expected any child I might have to have a net-positive-utility life (for themselves, not only for society at large) and indeed probably an above-average-utility life.
I expected having a child to be a net positive thing for marital harmony and happiness (I wouldn’t expect that for every couple and am not making any grand general claim here).
I don’t recall thinking much about the benefits of children in providing care when I’m old and decrepit, though I suppose there probably is some such benefit.
So far (~7.5 years in), we love our daughter to bits and so do others in our family (so #1,#2,#5 seem to be working as planned), she seems mostly very happy (so #4 seems OK so far), it’s obviously early days but my prediction is still that she’ll likely have a happy life overall (so #4 looks promising for the future) and I don’t know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
I first wanted to comment on 5, because I had previously read that having children reduces happiness. Interestingly, when searching a link (because I couldn’t remember where I had read it), I found this source (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf) that corrobates your specific expectation: children lead to higher happiness for older, better educated parents.
Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.
(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who’s thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there’s no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):
and I don’t know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it’s understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social ‘success’ and ‘benefit’.
Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)
That would be evidence (albeit, as you say, not very strong evidence) that my daughter’s contribution to net utility is above average. That doesn’t seem enough to guarantee it’s positive.
Good catch. Didn’t notice that one sneaking in there. That kind of invalidates most of my reasoning, so I’ll retract it willingly unless someone has an insight that saves the idea.
Disclaimer: I don’t have kids, won’t have them anytime soon (i.e. not in the next 5 years), and until relatively recently didn’t want them at all.
The best comparison I can make is that raising a child is like making a painting. It’s work, but it’s rewarding if done well. You create a human being, and hopefully impart them with good values and set them on a path to a happy life, and it’s a very personal experience.
Personally, I don’t have any drive to have kids, not one that’s comparable to hunger or sexual attraction.
I’d like that personal painting experience if it went well and I have experienced glimpses of it with some kids not of my own.
Unfortunately it’s not clear to me at all how much success of the project could be of my own doing, and I’ve seen enough examples of when things go horribly wrong despite of optimally seeming conditions. I wonder what kinds of studies could be done on the subject of parenting skills and parental satisfaction on the results of upbringing that aren’t hugely biased.
ETA: my five year old step brother just barged into my room (holiday at my folks). “You always get new knowledge in this room.”, he said, and I was compelled to pour that little vessel full again.
The same what motivates other people. Being rational doesn’t necessarily change your values.
Clearly, some people think having children is worthwhile and others don’t, so that’s individual. There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don’t make it though natural selection.
The amount of decision-making also obviously varies—from multi-year deliberations to “Dear, I’m pregnant!” :-)
There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don’t make it though natural selection.
Really? The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children. And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.
Humans, oddly enough, seem to have evolved adaptations for ensuring that people have unplanned pregnancies in spite of their big brains. Human females don’t have an obvious estrus cycle, their fertile periods are often unpredictable, and each individual act of copulation has a relatively low chance of causing a pregnancy. As a result, humans are often willing to have sex when they don’t want children and end up having them anyway.
The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children.
These are not mutually exclusive alternatives.
And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.
Not in those animals where babies require a long period of care and protection.
Being rational doesn’t necessarily change your values.
True, but it might make you weigh them very differently if you understand how biased your expectations are. I’m interested if people make some rational predictions about how happy having children will make them for example.
I already have a pretty good idea about how people in general make these decisions, hence the specific question.
With respect to adoption vs. biological children, having your own child allows you more control over the circumstances and also means the child will probably share a some facets of your / your mate’s personality, in ways that are often surprising and pleasurable.
With respect to raising children in general, it’s intrinsically rewarding, like a mix of writing a book and being in love. Also, if you’re assuming the environment won’t radically change, having youth probably makes aging easier.
(I don’t have children, but have watched them being raised. Unsure of my own plans.)
Nope, not planning to go Spock. I also edited the original question now for clarification.
having your own child allows you more control over the circumstances
I’d like to see some evidence how much control I can have. You’re describing just the best case scenario, but having a child can also be incredibly exhausting if things go wrong.
One more point that I haven’t seen brought up—listen to Queen:
Can anybody find me somebody to love? Each morning I get up I die a little Can barely stand on my feet Take a look in the mirror and cry Lord what you’re doing to me I have spent all my years in believing you But I just can’t get no relief, Lord! Somebody, somebody Can anybody find me somebody to love?
I don’t consider myself an explicit rationalist, but the desire to have children stems from the desire to have someone to take care of me when I am older.
Do you see your own conception and further life as a cause for “huge heap of disutility” that can’t be surpassed by the good stuff?
I’ve always been curious to see the response of someone with this view to the question:
What if you knew, as much as any things about the events of the world are known, that there will be circumstances in X years that make it impossible for any child you conceive to possibly take care of you when you are older?
In such a hypothetical, is the executive drive to have children still present, still being enforced by the programming of Azathoth, merely disconnected from the original trigger that made you specifically have this drive? Or does the desire go away? Or something else, maybe something I haven’t thought of (I hope it is!)?
Am I going to have a chance to actually interact with them, see them grow, etc?
I mean, assuming hypothetical case where as soon as a child is born, nefarious agents of Population Police snatch him never to be seen or heard from again, then I don’t really see the point of having children.
If on the other hand, I have a chance to actually act as a parent to him, then I guess it is worth it, after all, even if the child disappears as soon as it reaches adulthood and joins Secret Society of Ineffective Altruism never to be heard from again. I get no benefit of care, but I am happy that I introduced new human into the world (uh… I mean, I actually helped to do so, as it is a two-person exercise so to speak). It is not ideal case but I am still consider the effort well spent.
In ideal world, I still have a relation with my child, even as he/her reaches adulthood so that I can feel safer knowing that there is someone who (hopefully) considers all the generosity I have granted to him and holds me dear.
P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.
Thanks for the response! This puts several misunderstandings I had to rest.
P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.
Programming of Azathoth because Azathoth doesn’t give a shit about what you wish your own values were. Therefore what you want has no impact whatsoever on what your body and brain are programmed to do, such as make some humans want to have children even when every single aspect of it is negative (e.g. painful sex, painful pregnancy, painful birthing, hell to raise children, hellish economic conditions, absolutely horrible life for the child, etc. etc. such as we’ve seen some examples of in slave populations historically)
I suspect our world views might differ for a bit, as I don’t wish that my values where any different than they are. Why should I?
If Azathoth decided to instill the value that having children is somehow desirable deep into my mind, than I am very happy that as a first world parent I have all the resources I need to turn it into a pleasant endeavor with a very high expected value (happy new human who hopefully likes me and hopefully shares my values, but I don’t have much confidence in a second bet).
Not to me obviously. Not necessarily to my parents either, but I think they might have been quite lucky in addition to being good parents.
Doesn’t money take care of you when old too? As a side note, if I were old, dying and in a poor enough condition that I couldn’t look after myself, I’d rather sign off than make other people take care of me because I can’t imagine that being an enjoyable experience.
Still, if it is possible to have a happy children (and I assume happy humans are good stuff), where does the heap of dis-utility come into play?
EDIT: It is hard to form a meaningful relationship with money, and I would reckon that teaching it to uphold values similar to yours isn’t an easy task either. As for taking care I don’t mean palliative care as much as simply the relationship you have with your child.
You can have relationships with other people, and I think it’s easier to influence what they’re like.
I’ll list some forms of disutility later, but I think for now it’s better not to bias the answers to the original question further. I removed the “heap of disutility” part, it was unnecessarily exaggerated anyway.
What motivates rationalists to have children? How much rational decision making is involved?
ETA: removed the unnecessary emotional anchor.
ETA2: I’m not asking this out of Spockness, I think I have a pretty good map of normal human drives. I’m asking because I want to know if people have actually looked into the benefits, costs and risks involved, and done explicit reasoning on the subject.
I wouldn’t dream of speaking for rationalists generally, but in order to provide a data point I’ll answer for myself. I have one child; my wife and I were ~35 years old when we decided to have one. I am by any reasonable definition a rationalist; my wife is intelligent and quite rational but not in any very strong sense a rationalist. Introspection is unreliable but is all I have. I think my motivations were something like the following.
Having children as a terminal value, presumably programmed in by Azathoth and the culture I’m immersed in. This shows up subjectively as a few different things: liking the idea of a dependent small person to love, wanting one’s family line to continue, etc.
Having children as a terminal value for other people I care about (notably spouse and parents).
I think I think it’s best for the fertility rate to be close to the replacement rate (i.e., about 2 in a prosperous modern society with low infant mortality), and I think I’ve got pretty good genes; overall fertility rate in the country I’m in is a little below replacement and while it’s fairly densely populated I don’t think it’s pathologically so, so for me to have at least one child and probably two is probably beneficial for society overall.
I expected any child I might have to have a net-positive-utility life (for themselves, not only for society at large) and indeed probably an above-average-utility life.
I expected having a child to be a net positive thing for marital harmony and happiness (I wouldn’t expect that for every couple and am not making any grand general claim here).
I don’t recall thinking much about the benefits of children in providing care when I’m old and decrepit, though I suppose there probably is some such benefit.
So far (~7.5 years in), we love our daughter to bits and so do others in our family (so #1,#2,#5 seem to be working as planned), she seems mostly very happy (so #4 seems OK so far), it’s obviously early days but my prediction is still that she’ll likely have a happy life overall (so #4 looks promising for the future) and I don’t know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
I first wanted to comment on 5, because I had previously read that having children reduces happiness. Interestingly, when searching a link (because I couldn’t remember where I had read it), I found this source (http://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2012-013.pdf) that corrobates your specific expectation: children lead to higher happiness for older, better educated parents.
Having children is an example where two methodologies in happiness research dramatically diverge. One method is asking people in the moment how happy they are; the other is asking how they happy they generally feel about their lives. The first method finds that people really hate child care and is probably what you remembered.
I think the paper you’re thinking of is Kahneman et al’s A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method.
Notably,
On the other hand, having children also harms marital satisfaction. See, for example, here.
How excellent! It’s nice to be statistically typical :-).
(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who’s thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there’s no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):
I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it’s understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social ‘success’ and ‘benefit’.
Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)
That would be evidence (albeit, as you say, not very strong evidence) that my daughter’s contribution to net utility is above average. That doesn’t seem enough to guarantee it’s positive.
Good catch. Didn’t notice that one sneaking in there. That kind of invalidates most of my reasoning, so I’ll retract it willingly unless someone has an insight that saves the idea.
Disclaimer: I don’t have kids, won’t have them anytime soon (i.e. not in the next 5 years), and until relatively recently didn’t want them at all.
The best comparison I can make is that raising a child is like making a painting. It’s work, but it’s rewarding if done well. You create a human being, and hopefully impart them with good values and set them on a path to a happy life, and it’s a very personal experience.
Personally, I don’t have any drive to have kids, not one that’s comparable to hunger or sexual attraction.
I’d like that personal painting experience if it went well and I have experienced glimpses of it with some kids not of my own.
Unfortunately it’s not clear to me at all how much success of the project could be of my own doing, and I’ve seen enough examples of when things go horribly wrong despite of optimally seeming conditions. I wonder what kinds of studies could be done on the subject of parenting skills and parental satisfaction on the results of upbringing that aren’t hugely biased.
ETA: my five year old step brother just barged into my room (holiday at my folks). “You always get new knowledge in this room.”, he said, and I was compelled to pour that little vessel full again.
The same what motivates other people. Being rational doesn’t necessarily change your values.
Clearly, some people think having children is worthwhile and others don’t, so that’s individual. There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don’t make it though natural selection.
The amount of decision-making also obviously varies—from multi-year deliberations to “Dear, I’m pregnant!” :-)
Really? The reproductive urge in humans seems to be more centered on a desire for sex rather than on a desire for children. And, in most animals, this is sufficient; sex leads directly to reproduction without the brain having to take an active role after the exchange of genetic material takes place.
Humans, oddly enough, seem to have evolved adaptations for ensuring that people have unplanned pregnancies in spite of their big brains. Human females don’t have an obvious estrus cycle, their fertile periods are often unpredictable, and each individual act of copulation has a relatively low chance of causing a pregnancy. As a result, humans are often willing to have sex when they don’t want children and end up having them anyway.
These are not mutually exclusive alternatives.
Not in those animals where babies require a long period of care and protection.
Yes, you’re right. I didn’t think to put the “take care of your children once they’re out of the uterus” programming into the same category.
A developmentally complex species needs a drive to care for offspring. A simple species just needs a drive to reproduce.
ETA: What Lumifer said
Women talk to me about baby fever all the time. Lucky me, eh.
True, but it might make you weigh them very differently if you understand how biased your expectations are. I’m interested if people make some rational predictions about how happy having children will make them for example.
I already have a pretty good idea about how people in general make these decisions, hence the specific question.
I think you mean “humans”?
With respect to adoption vs. biological children, having your own child allows you more control over the circumstances and also means the child will probably share a some facets of your / your mate’s personality, in ways that are often surprising and pleasurable.
With respect to raising children in general, it’s intrinsically rewarding, like a mix of writing a book and being in love. Also, if you’re assuming the environment won’t radically change, having youth probably makes aging easier.
(I don’t have children, but have watched them being raised. Unsure of my own plans.)
Nope, not planning to go Spock. I also edited the original question now for clarification.
I’d like to see some evidence how much control I can have. You’re describing just the best case scenario, but having a child can also be incredibly exhausting if things go wrong.
Oh, okay. Sorry to misunderstand. (Also, I meant “control” as compared to the control one has when adopting.)
In that case, I have insufficient research for a meaningful answer. I guess one aught to start here or there or there, to get a rough idea?
One more point that I haven’t seen brought up—listen to Queen:
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
Each morning I get up I die a little
Can barely stand on my feet
Take a look in the mirror and cry
Lord what you’re doing to me
I have spent all my years in believing you
But I just can’t get no relief,
Lord!
Somebody, somebody
Can anybody find me somebody to love?
Personally, I’d recommend a dog or cat to this person.
Children as match makers when you’re too old to stand on your feet? ;)
That’s an interesting interpretation :-) it was also fun to watch it evolve :-D
I was calibrating political correctness.
Entirely within your own mind? I don’t think you got any external feedback to base calibration on :-)
I got plenty of feedback from the intensive simulations I ran.
I don’t consider myself an explicit rationalist, but the desire to have children stems from the desire to have someone to take care of me when I am older.
Do you see your own conception and further life as a cause for “huge heap of disutility” that can’t be surpassed by the good stuff?
I’ve always been curious to see the response of someone with this view to the question:
What if you knew, as much as any things about the events of the world are known, that there will be circumstances in X years that make it impossible for any child you conceive to possibly take care of you when you are older?
In such a hypothetical, is the executive drive to have children still present, still being enforced by the programming of Azathoth, merely disconnected from the original trigger that made you specifically have this drive? Or does the desire go away? Or something else, maybe something I haven’t thought of (I hope it is!)?
Am I going to have a chance to actually interact with them, see them grow, etc?
I mean, assuming hypothetical case where as soon as a child is born, nefarious agents of Population Police snatch him never to be seen or heard from again, then I don’t really see the point of having children.
If on the other hand, I have a chance to actually act as a parent to him, then I guess it is worth it, after all, even if the child disappears as soon as it reaches adulthood and joins Secret Society of Ineffective Altruism never to be heard from again. I get no benefit of care, but I am happy that I introduced new human into the world (uh… I mean, I actually helped to do so, as it is a two-person exercise so to speak). It is not ideal case but I am still consider the effort well spent.
In ideal world, I still have a relation with my child, even as he/her reaches adulthood so that I can feel safer knowing that there is someone who (hopefully) considers all the generosity I have granted to him and holds me dear.
P.S. Why programing of Azathoth? In my mind it makes it sound as if desire to have children was something intristically bad.
Thanks for the response! This puts several misunderstandings I had to rest.
Programming of Azathoth because Azathoth doesn’t give a shit about what you wish your own values were. Therefore what you want has no impact whatsoever on what your body and brain are programmed to do, such as make some humans want to have children even when every single aspect of it is negative (e.g. painful sex, painful pregnancy, painful birthing, hell to raise children, hellish economic conditions, absolutely horrible life for the child, etc. etc. such as we’ve seen some examples of in slave populations historically)
I suspect our world views might differ for a bit, as I don’t wish that my values where any different than they are. Why should I?
If Azathoth decided to instill the value that having children is somehow desirable deep into my mind, than I am very happy that as a first world parent I have all the resources I need to turn it into a pleasant endeavor with a very high expected value (happy new human who hopefully likes me and hopefully shares my values, but I don’t have much confidence in a second bet).
Not to me obviously. Not necessarily to my parents either, but I think they might have been quite lucky in addition to being good parents.
Doesn’t money take care of you when old too? As a side note, if I were old, dying and in a poor enough condition that I couldn’t look after myself, I’d rather sign off than make other people take care of me because I can’t imagine that being an enjoyable experience.
Still, if it is possible to have a happy children (and I assume happy humans are good stuff), where does the heap of dis-utility come into play?
EDIT: It is hard to form a meaningful relationship with money, and I would reckon that teaching it to uphold values similar to yours isn’t an easy task either. As for taking care I don’t mean palliative care as much as simply the relationship you have with your child.
You can have relationships with other people, and I think it’s easier to influence what they’re like.
I’ll list some forms of disutility later, but I think for now it’s better not to bias the answers to the original question further. I removed the “heap of disutility” part, it was unnecessarily exaggerated anyway.
You can have a relationship with your friends, but don’t expect them to take care of you when you’re old.