B didn’t choose to win the lottery; B choose to play the lottery. Surely when considering whether an action would be good to take, one would have to consider all the attempts that didn’t lead to success?
Randy_M
Who is the we there? I’m not declaiming responsibility, but interested in who these women feel is pressuring them. I’d wager it’s largely a status competition with other women.
There is certainly an inner drive, more pronounced in women, because species without such a drive don’t make it though natural selection.
A developmentally complex species needs a drive to care for offspring. A simple species just needs a drive to reproduce.
ETA: What Lumifer said
But the point is, is steelmanning someone making a better model of them than just taking them at their own words? If the point is in fact to understand them, rather than to challenge your own position, and they are arguing competantly and honestly, it probably is. Edit: Meant “is not”!
Why would you think I didn’t do such analyses before having children?
Well, because most people don’t, therefore you certainly didn’t. It’s, uh, Bayesian or something.
three aspects of parenting that I suspect are the main reasons why people choose to have kids or not: the financial case, the moral case, and the practical case
None of these are reasons to choose to have kids; they are all reasons not to. That is, even if you refute them, you still haven’t made a positive case.
This brings up the issue of whether or not you “owe” your child an all expenses paid college education. I wouldn’t rule out only paying partially for your child’s college education especially since this calculation assumes only one child. I would be interested to hear more thoughts on this matter.
I don’t feel obligated to provide any college tuition to any of my children; I certainly haven’t ruled it out, but to have had their prospective existence hinge on going to a college or not seems to wildly exagerate the importance of a college degree.
I also tend to think the other financial costs of having a child are overblown due to a desire for convenience or status (that is, there are cheaper ways of doing things that may not signal high status, but that is true of everything really)
Not sure what you mean by that. You feel European conservativism is crazy? You feel the interpretation of US conservatism is crazy? You feel US conservatives are functionally identical to crazy, if not actually so?
It’s an interesting topic, the moreso because it is taboo, and not exactly tangential to the subject, I think.
If terminal values are definitionally immutable, than I used the wrong term.
Just imagine that you would have a certain proof (by observing parallel universes, or by simulations done by superhuman AI) that e.g. a tolerance of homosexuality inevitably leads to a destruction of civilization, or that every civilization that invents nanotechnology inevitably destroys itself in nanotechnological wars unless the whole planet is united under rule of the communist party. If you had a good reason to believe these models, what would your values make you do?
Perfect information scenarios are useful in clarifying some cases, I suppose (and lets go with the non-humanity destroying option every time) but I don’t find them to map too closely to actual situations.
I’m not sure I can aptly articulate by intuition here. By differences in values, I don’t really think people will differ so much as to have much difference in terminal values should they each make a list of everything they would want in a perfect world (barring outliers). But the relative weights that people place on them, while differing only slightly, may end up suggesting quite different policy proposals, especially in a world of imperfect information, even if each is interested in using reason.
But I’ll concede that some ideologies are much more comfortable with more utilitarian analysis versus more rigid imperatives that are more likely to yield consistent results.
That makes sense. I mean, whether you cut fat or carbs you still have access to a variety of meat and vegetables, and people would want to study one variable at a time.
Or there’s multiple needs that play on the same mechanism, making it harder to tangle out specific causes, rather than simpler. You need calories and nutrients from food to function properly, why should hunger only arise from one?
And also, you are assuming we have identified every micronutrient are are capable of adequately fortifying a donut with them.
Has there been a comparrison done of the relative micro-nutrient levels of low carb vs low fat diets? I think its very plausible that nutrient deficiency could manifest as hunger, generating weight gain as the body compels oneself to eat enough to fulfill nutrient requirements despite the excess of calories.
No, I think people can be persuaded on terminal values, although to an extent that modifies my response above; rationality will tell you that certain values are more likely to conflict, and noticing internal contradictions—pitting two vales against each other—is one way to convince someone to alter—or just adjust the relative worth of—their terminal values. Due to the complexity of social reality I don’t think you are going to find too many with beliefs that are perfectly consistent; that is, any mainstream political affiliations is unlikely to be a shinning paragon of coherance and logical progression built upon core principles relative to its competitors. But demonstrate with examples if I’m wrong.
You do not have to eliminate other explanations to accept genetic causes. A combination is likely. Bu you have to prove other causes explain all the effect in all cases to prove genetic equivalence.
I think political differences come down to values moreso than beliefs about facts. Rationalism doesn’t dictate terminal values.
For various levels of superficiality, yeah.
“The first should not have anything to do with how rational you are, while the second very much should. ” What does should mean there, and from where do you derive it?
More dilute compared to the (cellular) mass of a person? That’s a rather lot of water.
I assumed it wasn’t net, but the amount of water excreted, regardless of consumption. Though those probably are not unrelated processes.