There are two ways of making the world better: you can remove suckiness, or you can increase awesomeness. Deciding to never have kids is ceding one of the primary ways in which global awesome can be increased in favor of decreasing global suck. If you live your life only concerned with decreasing suck—or, more importantly, if everyone lived this way—the worldwide suck level would likely equilibrate to tolerable levels and then stagnate.
Space exploration is indulgent; that money should be spent on mosquito nets. Arts detract from time which could be spent earning money to donate; give it up. Having children is selfish; instead, make the lives of people you will never meet slightly less intolerable. Instead of studying to be an engineer so you can build/find/create hospitals/oil/technology, become a day trader and increase the efficiency of markets by a negligible fraction while donating your earnings.
Of course I am being tongue in cheek. You should do both things—increase awesome and decrease suck. There can’t be a knockdown argument against having children because it would generalize to a knockdown argument against trying to do anything except perfectly optimal cash generation and donation.
Suppose you’re a book-lover and your house is on fire. You get your spouse and children out and ignore your books. That doesn’t mean you don’t care about books, it means you’ve got an emergency that requires you to focus on other things.
Suppose you love awesomeness and the world is full of cheaply fixable suckiness. Maybe you fix the suckiness first and ignore the tempting vistas of awesomeness. That doesn’t mean you don’t value awesomeness, it means there’s an emergency.
So if someone decides that they need to make big sacrifices to decrease suck, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they think decreasing suck is all that matters. They might care about awesome too, but trade off awesome against suck in such a way that right now concentrating on suck is important.
Does thinking that way mean endorsing a world in which no one ever does anything but suck-minimization? Nope, not quite. It means endorsing a world in which everyone concentrates on suck-minimization as long as there’s a huge suckiness problem. Once we’ve dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness. And at that point there’ll be a lot more people with a reasonable prospect of some awesomeness in their lives, so maybe we actually maximize long-term awesomeness that way too.
(I do not necessarily endorse that position. I certainly don’t act in a manner perfectly consistent with it. But I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that arguing for sacrifices in the name of reduced suckiness amounts to preferring a world in which everyone spends all their time toiling for minimized suck and nothing awesome happens. Our book-lover doesn’t want a world in which everyone spends all their time rescuing people from fires—but as long as the fire is burning and people need rescuing, what else should one do?)
Once we’ve dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness.
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can’t deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they’re honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the starving masses long enough, they will go away).
I propose a middle ground between giving everything and giving nothing—a non-arbitrary cutoff for how much help is enough. A cutoff that can be defended on pragmatic grounds without having to assume a shared normative morality.
You put just enough resources into pure suckiness remediation to insure that spillover suckiness will not derail your awesomeness plans. I emphasize pure because there are pursuits that simultaneously strive for new heights of awesomeness and fix suck in equal measure. Obviously this quality is desirable and such projects should not be penalized for having it.
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck?
Well, that would be very bad, and it might mean that an altruist of the sort I describe would in fact think the best course of action would be relentless suck-mitigation, for ever. A world of relentless suck-mitigation wouldn’t be a lot of fun, but if you’re faced with an inexhaustible supply of suck it might be the best you could do.
[EDITED to add: I see you’ve been downvoted. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t me.]
you can remove suckiness, or you can increase awesomeness
The charities I think are doing the most good are working along “remove suckiness” lines, but an “increase awesomeness” charity could get you much more awesomeness per dollar than having kids.
Think marginally. The argument is that right now, the world’s population would be better off on net if more people gave to effective charities instead of having kids.
There are two ways of making the world better: you can remove suckiness, or you can increase awesomeness. Deciding to never have kids is ceding one of the primary ways in which global awesome can be increased in favor of decreasing global suck. If you live your life only concerned with decreasing suck—or, more importantly, if everyone lived this way—the worldwide suck level would likely equilibrate to tolerable levels and then stagnate.
Space exploration is indulgent; that money should be spent on mosquito nets. Arts detract from time which could be spent earning money to donate; give it up. Having children is selfish; instead, make the lives of people you will never meet slightly less intolerable. Instead of studying to be an engineer so you can build/find/create hospitals/oil/technology, become a day trader and increase the efficiency of markets by a negligible fraction while donating your earnings.
Of course I am being tongue in cheek. You should do both things—increase awesome and decrease suck. There can’t be a knockdown argument against having children because it would generalize to a knockdown argument against trying to do anything except perfectly optimal cash generation and donation.
Suppose you’re a book-lover and your house is on fire. You get your spouse and children out and ignore your books. That doesn’t mean you don’t care about books, it means you’ve got an emergency that requires you to focus on other things.
Suppose you love awesomeness and the world is full of cheaply fixable suckiness. Maybe you fix the suckiness first and ignore the tempting vistas of awesomeness. That doesn’t mean you don’t value awesomeness, it means there’s an emergency.
So if someone decides that they need to make big sacrifices to decrease suck, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they think decreasing suck is all that matters. They might care about awesome too, but trade off awesome against suck in such a way that right now concentrating on suck is important.
Does thinking that way mean endorsing a world in which no one ever does anything but suck-minimization? Nope, not quite. It means endorsing a world in which everyone concentrates on suck-minimization as long as there’s a huge suckiness problem. Once we’ve dealt with the mass starvation, vast numbers of deaths from malaria, horrendous poverty, etc., then we can start paying a lot more attention to awesomeness. And at that point there’ll be a lot more people with a reasonable prospect of some awesomeness in their lives, so maybe we actually maximize long-term awesomeness that way too.
(I do not necessarily endorse that position. I certainly don’t act in a manner perfectly consistent with it. But I don’t think it’s at all fair to say that arguing for sacrifices in the name of reduced suckiness amounts to preferring a world in which everyone spends all their time toiling for minimized suck and nothing awesome happens. Our book-lover doesn’t want a world in which everyone spends all their time rescuing people from fires—but as long as the fire is burning and people need rescuing, what else should one do?)
What if, for practical purposes, there is an inexhaustible supply of suck? What if we can’t deal with it once and for all and then turn our attention to the fun stuff?
So, judging from the reception of my post about the Malthusian Crunch certain Wrongians sense this and have gone into denial (perhaps, if they’re honest with themselves, privately admitting the hope that if they ignore the starving masses long enough, they will go away).
I propose a middle ground between giving everything and giving nothing—a non-arbitrary cutoff for how much help is enough. A cutoff that can be defended on pragmatic grounds without having to assume a shared normative morality.
You put just enough resources into pure suckiness remediation to insure that spillover suckiness will not derail your awesomeness plans. I emphasize pure because there are pursuits that simultaneously strive for new heights of awesomeness and fix suck in equal measure. Obviously this quality is desirable and such projects should not be penalized for having it.
Well, that would be very bad, and it might mean that an altruist of the sort I describe would in fact think the best course of action would be relentless suck-mitigation, for ever. A world of relentless suck-mitigation wouldn’t be a lot of fun, but if you’re faced with an inexhaustible supply of suck it might be the best you could do.
[EDITED to add: I see you’ve been downvoted. For what it’s worth, that wasn’t me.]
The charities I think are doing the most good are working along “remove suckiness” lines, but an “increase awesomeness” charity could get you much more awesomeness per dollar than having kids.
Think marginally. The argument is that right now, the world’s population would be better off on net if more people gave to effective charities instead of having kids.
I want to increase awesome by decreasing suck.
There are a lot of paths in science and engineering that accomplish that, and space travel (in the long view) is definitely one of them.