A solid thing might be to get them used to the idea of only having one child (and freezing gametes just in case of course).
If people are happy with one child, that means that if either the lightcone or the earth economy has limited resources to support legacy humans (eg if everyone lives off their grandparents money in a world where money is massively deflated but there’s no jobs, or legacy humans need to share their lifespan with every child they “birth” due to the lightcone having finite energy) then everyone will be choosing 1-2 kids instead of 2-3. So they might as well be happy about that instead of sad. Early childhood intervention is the best time to avoid setting them up for disappointment later (they will be pleasantly surprised instead if 3turns out to be the right choice). I don’t know anything about population ethics, but I know what it’s like to be disappointed about this.
No idea how to explain that well, eg “we’re glad we chose to have all of you, but we didn’t find out until 2years ago that you will probably be happiest with 1-2 because grown ups make mistakes too and we didn’t know there might be problems with running out of space”. But it’s a limited time to say “yeah we had 3 but that doesn’t mean you should” because they won’t listen later, or something, idk (boggles my mind that trying to explain anthropics to a 6-yo is basically guaranteed to fail and make asteroid fears worse).
There seem to be a lot of assumptions in the argument for only one child. And even if that specific line of reasoning turns out to be eventually correct doesn’t mean it has to hold now.
I still think this is correct, but a better approach would be to encourage kids to be flexible with their life plan, and to think about making major life decisions based on what the world ends up looking like rather than what they currently think is normal.
Kids raised in larger families tend to see larger families as what they’ll do later in life, and this habit of thought gets placed early on and is hard to change when they’re older, so that’s an example of a good early intervention to prepare them for the future before their preferences get locked in, but it’s not the only one.
I agree that there is a correlation between kids of large families having/preferring larger families, but it is not a strong one, and we don’t know how it interacts with all the other things you assume. So I think is another weak argument with its own set of additional assumptions. I think you have to make a stronger case.
A solid thing might be to get them used to the idea of only having one child (and freezing gametes just in case of course).
If people are happy with one child, that means that if either the lightcone or the earth economy has limited resources to support legacy humans (eg if everyone lives off their grandparents money in a world where money is massively deflated but there’s no jobs, or legacy humans need to share their lifespan with every child they “birth” due to the lightcone having finite energy) then everyone will be choosing 1-2 kids instead of 2-3. So they might as well be happy about that instead of sad. Early childhood intervention is the best time to avoid setting them up for disappointment later (they will be pleasantly surprised instead if 3turns out to be the right choice). I don’t know anything about population ethics, but I know what it’s like to be disappointed about this.
No idea how to explain that well, eg “we’re glad we chose to have all of you, but we didn’t find out until 2years ago that you will probably be happiest with 1-2 because grown ups make mistakes too and we didn’t know there might be problems with running out of space”. But it’s a limited time to say “yeah we had 3 but that doesn’t mean you should” because they won’t listen later, or something, idk (boggles my mind that trying to explain anthropics to a 6-yo is basically guaranteed to fail and make asteroid fears worse).
There seem to be a lot of assumptions in the argument for only one child. And even if that specific line of reasoning turns out to be eventually correct doesn’t mean it has to hold now.
I still think this is correct, but a better approach would be to encourage kids to be flexible with their life plan, and to think about making major life decisions based on what the world ends up looking like rather than what they currently think is normal.
Kids raised in larger families tend to see larger families as what they’ll do later in life, and this habit of thought gets placed early on and is hard to change when they’re older, so that’s an example of a good early intervention to prepare them for the future before their preferences get locked in, but it’s not the only one.
I agree that there is a correlation between kids of large families having/preferring larger families, but it is not a strong one, and we don’t know how it interacts with all the other things you assume. So I think is another weak argument with its own set of additional assumptions. I think you have to make a stronger case.