LessWrong 2.0 Reader

does that require you to either have the ability to commit to a plan or the inclination to consistently pick your plan from some prior epistemic perspective

You aren't required to take an action (/start acting on a plan) that is worse from your current perspective than some alternative. Let maximality-dominated mean "w.r.t. each distribution in my representor, worse in expectation than some alternative." (As opposed to "dominated" in the sense of "worse than an alternative with certainty".) Then, in general you would need^[1] to ask, "Among the actions/plans that are not maximality-dominated from my current perspective, which of these are dominated from my prior perspective?" And rule those out.

1. ^{^}

   If you care about diachronic norms of rationality, that is.

What? If every couple had only one child, the population would halve at each generation. That's what they mean. Replacement rate requires more than just one child.

I mean, the whole point was "how can we have fertility but also not be a dystopia". You just described a dystopia. It's also kind of telling that the only way to make people have children, something that is supposedly a joyous experience, you can think of is "have a tyrannical dictator make it very clear that they'll make sure the alternative is even worse". That's pretty telling. Someone thinking this way is part of the problem more than they are of the solution.

I honestly think "find the elixir of immortality within a couple of generations" is not what I'd call a pragmatic plan to solve this. Personally I don't think having 2 or 3 children would necessarily be such a curse in a different kind of world. A few obvious changes that I think would help towards that:

• short of immortality, any extension of youth helps. Part of the problem here is that by the time we feel like we've got our shit sorted out, we're almost too old to have children;

• artificial wombs. Smooth out the risks of pregnancy and eliminate the biological divide between men and women in this deal;

• houses, houses, houses. Children need space. People want to give their children space. "Shit sorted out" almost always includes buying a house. Build more fucking houses. Have priorities;

• a less neurotic culture around children. We kept raising the bar about what it means to be a good parent and then we're surprised so many people see it as way too stressful and hard for them. Make more independence to children not only legal when it's not, but normal. That has the double benefit of being known to actually really help the psychological growth of those children and of leaving more free time to the parents. Are there risks? Yes, but all life comes with risks, they can be mitigated in other ways, and these risks I feel are likely perceived way more than statistics would justify;

• get our priorities straight about work. Look, yes, productivity is important and all. But effectively our society tells people that if you want to work towards developing a new sports betting app, that's £80,000 per year; if you want to work towards making sure the city doesn't fall to dysentery by keeping it clean, that's £30,000 per year; and if you want to have and raise the next generation, a £100,000 lump sum for 18 years of work would be the wildest thing we can think of. Obviously this is not even on the same scale. Pay a straight up parental sabbatical for people at peak reproductive age (say, 25-35), see what happens. A time to do mostly parenting and nothing else, maybe some easy part time work on the side. Does that mean losing some peak productive years? Yes, of course. Would that productivity be best used for society making sure all the middle management is properly middle managed in the umpteenth marketing company?

The problem is honestly that this issue is so polarized. So doing anything about it is now associated with being with the religious right wing (or worse, the racist right wing specifically worried about white people being out-bred), which then means that the actually more liberal and rational parts of the centre-right, centre and left abhor touching it and have to pretend there's no problem. The Amish thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the way forward in this sense would be to spin it: not "you must have children for the sake of humanity's future!", but "our inability to allow people to have children is actually ruining their potential happiness". There's already some efforts in that direction but they feel quite half assed, and I think the left in particular focuses too much on the economic aspects only without seeing that there's a bit more at play.

I basically don't care about philosophy of mind anymore, mostly because I don't care about philosophy anymore.

Philosophy, as a project, is usually about two things. One, figure out metaphysics. Two, figure out a correct ontology for reality.

Both of these are flawed projects. Metaphysics is that which we can't know from experience, so it's all speculative and also unnecessary, because we can model the world adequately without supposing to know how it works beyond our ability to observe it. Fake metaphysics is helpful contingently because it lets you have fake models that are easier to reason about, but that's the main use case.

As for finding a correct ontology, we know the map is not the territory, and further there are many possible maps. All models are wrong, some are useful.

I did still care about philosophy a lot right up until "I" switched into PNSE, which happened after several thousands hours of meditation practice, and a lot of other things, too.

Basically what I can say is, the whole idea of philosophy of mind is confused, because it supposes mind to be something separate from reality itself. But the world is only known through mind, and so the world is mind. The appearance of an external world is a useful model for predicting future experiences, and it works well to think and behave as if there is an external reality, because that's a metaphysical belief that pays substantial rent. But, epistemologically speaking, external reality is not prior to experience, and thus deeper questions about consciousness are mostly confused because they mix up causal dependency in one's ontology.

I think the state handling child rearing is the long term solution. The need for new people is a society wide problem and not ultimately one of personal responsibility.  Of course people should still be free to do it on their own if they want. It'll be weird that not everyone will have traditional parents, but I think we can figure it out. Maybe a mandatory or highly incentivized big brother/ sister program would help make it more nurturing.

Your argument seemed to be that the fertility fall is not just a temporary thing where people's want is currently overwhelmed by other factors, but a stronger diswant that cannot be counterbalanced by shifting those factors. Revealed preference only shows what things are like with the current balance of factors.

In hindsight, the answer here was "buy NVIDIA call options"

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