I’m still not sure whether sex and romance are entirely lotus eating
If you accept that humans have needs that have to be fulfilled, otherwise the human with unfulfilled needs gradually becomes unhappy and consequently also unproductive, sex at the same time satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction. It may also be a good foundation for long-term cooperation; you essentially condition yourself to feel happy when interacting with given person.
And if you are signed up for cryonics, you hope for the future generations to be smart enough to invent the technology necessary to revive you. For that to happen, smart people today need to reproduce. (And it’s not just about biology, but also about culture. You don’t want all smart people in the future to be deathists, etc.)
Sure, family can take a lot of time and resources. Maybe we should use some brainpower to think about ways how to make it easier. For example, having a rationalist community at some place where having children is less expensive. Sharing child care, doing homeschooling together, etc. Who knows what the children growing up in a rationalist community could become.
I feel like I detect a lot of typical-minding in your (very well-intentioned and kind and thoughtful) comment. I don’t accept that any given individual has particular needs in that arena that must be fulfilled, though I definitely agree that the population as a whole does (and the mean and median and mode humans as well). But just the claim that “sex satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction” is … well, it makes me sad because it’s probably true for you and true for most people, and that makes it worse that it’s false for me.
In general, I suspect that your stance here contains a lot of motivated cognition, specifically because I recall being on the outside of it, looking in, and noting that the strength of the average adult’s faith in such things clearly exceeded the available evidence. There are tons of evolutionary pressures leaning on us, here; it’s unreasonable to expect that our thinking in this arena is not clouded and distorted.
As for projects in raising children through the rationalist community, my primary prediction is that the majority of them will end up deeply screwed up or abandoning the culture of their parents, and that the small number that squeak through and become awesome within this culture will be only about as frequent as the small number that become awesome outside it.
We wouldn’t raise children in an above-baseline way? Why? Why would our culture be so deeply broken that it is unable to do this super important job that has entire forests of low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked? No, we won’t be perfect or anything, and of course our thinking will be massively distorted just like everyone else’s, but why would we fail to even improve on general Western strategies that are obviously deeply sub-optimal and broken?
If we can’t do that better than baseline expectation, honestly what are we even doing here? Our entire artifice doesn’t work. We should admit it, pack up our balls and go home before heading out to try something else. Or to put it another way, if we can’t even raise a child when we put our mind to that, how in heck are we gonna build a friendly AGI? Or do any of the other six impossible things we’d like to do before breakfast?
That doesn’t mean we should do it. You can quite reasonably argue you believe you, or we, have better things to do with our time and effort. I’m not even claiming here that we should do it (and I’m definitely not even thinking that you in particular should do it), although my actually doing it is a reasonably strong revealed preference. What I am claiming is that if you’re saying we couldn’t do it, that we would fail if we tried, then I think it’s vital to dig very deep into that intuition and figure out exactly why you think that.
This is a personal prediction, based on personal judgments about specific people engaged in a specific instantiation of this project. I would be happy to go on for multiple tens of thousands of words about this in private, but I suspect that doing so in public will do nothing but trigger tribalism and status games and defensiveness and all sorts of point-scoring that have nothing to do with anybody’s actual reasons for their beliefs.
Long story short, if you buy that I might actually have important pieces of the map, find me offline.
I will say this much: the bulk of my prediction lies in a model of people in this community responding naively to problems modeled well by the pendulum paradigm.
If you accept that humans have needs that have to be fulfilled, otherwise the human with unfulfilled needs gradually becomes unhappy and consequently also unproductive, sex at the same time satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction. It may also be a good foundation for long-term cooperation; you essentially condition yourself to feel happy when interacting with given person.
And if you are signed up for cryonics, you hope for the future generations to be smart enough to invent the technology necessary to revive you. For that to happen, smart people today need to reproduce. (And it’s not just about biology, but also about culture. You don’t want all smart people in the future to be deathists, etc.)
Sure, family can take a lot of time and resources. Maybe we should use some brainpower to think about ways how to make it easier. For example, having a rationalist community at some place where having children is less expensive. Sharing child care, doing homeschooling together, etc. Who knows what the children growing up in a rationalist community could become.
I feel like I detect a lot of typical-minding in your (very well-intentioned and kind and thoughtful) comment. I don’t accept that any given individual has particular needs in that arena that must be fulfilled, though I definitely agree that the population as a whole does (and the mean and median and mode humans as well). But just the claim that “sex satisfies one’s needs for pleasure and social interaction” is … well, it makes me sad because it’s probably true for you and true for most people, and that makes it worse that it’s false for me.
In general, I suspect that your stance here contains a lot of motivated cognition, specifically because I recall being on the outside of it, looking in, and noting that the strength of the average adult’s faith in such things clearly exceeded the available evidence. There are tons of evolutionary pressures leaning on us, here; it’s unreasonable to expect that our thinking in this arena is not clouded and distorted.
As for projects in raising children through the rationalist community, my primary prediction is that the majority of them will end up deeply screwed up or abandoning the culture of their parents, and that the small number that squeak through and become awesome within this culture will be only about as frequent as the small number that become awesome outside it.
We wouldn’t raise children in an above-baseline way? Why? Why would our culture be so deeply broken that it is unable to do this super important job that has entire forests of low-hanging fruit waiting to be picked? No, we won’t be perfect or anything, and of course our thinking will be massively distorted just like everyone else’s, but why would we fail to even improve on general Western strategies that are obviously deeply sub-optimal and broken?
If we can’t do that better than baseline expectation, honestly what are we even doing here? Our entire artifice doesn’t work. We should admit it, pack up our balls and go home before heading out to try something else. Or to put it another way, if we can’t even raise a child when we put our mind to that, how in heck are we gonna build a friendly AGI? Or do any of the other six impossible things we’d like to do before breakfast?
That doesn’t mean we should do it. You can quite reasonably argue you believe you, or we, have better things to do with our time and effort. I’m not even claiming here that we should do it (and I’m definitely not even thinking that you in particular should do it), although my actually doing it is a reasonably strong revealed preference. What I am claiming is that if you’re saying we couldn’t do it, that we would fail if we tried, then I think it’s vital to dig very deep into that intuition and figure out exactly why you think that.
This is a personal prediction, based on personal judgments about specific people engaged in a specific instantiation of this project. I would be happy to go on for multiple tens of thousands of words about this in private, but I suspect that doing so in public will do nothing but trigger tribalism and status games and defensiveness and all sorts of point-scoring that have nothing to do with anybody’s actual reasons for their beliefs.
Long story short, if you buy that I might actually have important pieces of the map, find me offline.
I will say this much: the bulk of my prediction lies in a model of people in this community responding naively to problems modeled well by the pendulum paradigm.