Fertility Will Never Recover

Ask all your friends. How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children? Really excited and joyously motivated—not because it’s their duty for humanity and they’re on the EA burnout path. The life worth living is one with one child per couple among happy couples. Or 1.35 on average when you count the outliers.

I'm almost certainly somewhat of an outlier, but I am very excited about having 3+ children. My ideal number is 5 (or maybe more if I become reasonably wealthy). My girlfriend is also on board.

I just can't picture anything more joyous in a normal life (i.e. excluding upload enabled perma-jhana) than finding someone I deeply love and combining ourselves to make new people. It's a miracle that's even possible! If this wasn't a normal part of everyday life people would laugh at you for proposing such an absurd thing could ever be real.

EDIT: One more thing worth mentioning: If we ignore AGI for a second (not much point in talking about this otherwise), I think the long term solution to this problem is to create pro-natalist microcultures. Groups of friends living around each other raising their children in a shared environment. My dream is to live close to friends who also have a bunch of kids and raise them alongside people I love.

I know from reading reports of parents who have done or tried this that it's not trivial. One of the most difficult parts seems to be getting everyone to agree to a set of parenting standards and having the flexibility and acceptance to not require perfect adherence to every rule from every parent all the time. But we are still going to try to make this happen, probably somewhere close by the bay area.

One solution is life extension. I would prefer to have one child every 20 years (have two with 14 years difference). So if life expectancy and fertility age will grow to 100 years old, many people will eventually have 2-3 children. 

People do not want more than one child. Some don’t even want one. Two children is viewed as a stretch goal. 

The first Google result I get for "ideal family size in america" is a 2023 Gallup poll according to which 44% of Americans who had an opinion think two children is the idea family size, and 45% that three or more children is.

My current impression is that most people would prefer to have more children than they actually end up having, but there are various societal forces in play making this hard, so it'll take some time to develop the necessary social technologies to better align people's family sizes with their preferences.

Because I don’t care about “humanity in general” nearly as much as I care about my society. Yes, sure, the descendants of the Amish and the Taliban will cover the earth. That’s not a future I strive for. I’d be willing to give up large chunks of the planet to an ASI to prevent that.

I don't know how you would prevent that. Absent an AI catastrophe, fertility will recover, in the sense that "we" (rationalists etc) will mostly be replaced with people of low IQ and impulse control, exactly those populations that have the highest fertility now. And "banishing aging and death" would not prevent them from having high fertility and dominating the future. Moloch is relentless. The problem is more serious than you think.

For anecdata: id be really jazzed about 3 or 4, 5 might be a little crazy but somewhat open to that or more.

Ladies

Not worth worrying about given context of imminent ASI.

But assuming a Butlerian jihad occurs to make it an issue of importance again then most topics surrounding it are gone into at depth by radical pro-natalists Simone and Malcom Gladwell, who have employed genetic screening of their embryos to attempt to have more high-achievers,  on their near-daily podcast https://www.youtube.com/user/simoneharuko .  While quite odd  in their outlook they delve into all sorts of sociopolitical issues from the pronatalist worldview.  Largely rationalist and very interesting and informative, though well outside of Overton window on a lot of subjects.

How do we know money wouldn’t work? Surely most of the reasons people don’t have more children could be solved with more resources (eg surrogacy, childcare, private school fees, a larger house).

You cannot incentivize people to make that sacrifice at anything close to the proper scale because people don’t want money that badly. How many hands would you amputate for $100,000?

There's just no political will to do it, since the solutions would be harsh or expensive enough that nobody could impose them upon society. A god-emperor, who really wished to increase fertility numbers and could set laws freely without the society revolting, could use some combination of these methods:

• If you're childless, or perhaps just unmarried, you pay additional taxes. The amount can be adjusted to be as high as necessary. Alternatively, just raise the general tax rate and give reduction based on the number of children. If having children meant more money instead of less, that would help quite a bit.
• Legally mandate having children. In some countries, men are forced into military service. You could require women to have children in similar way. Medical exceptions are already a thing for military service, they could apply here as well.
• Remove VAT and other taxes from daycare services, and medical services for children.
• Offer free medical services to children. And parents. (And everyone.)
• Spend lots of money and research how to create children in artificial wombs. Do that.
• The state could handle child-rearing, similar to how it works in Plato's Republic. I.e. scale up orphanage system massively and make that socially acceptable.
• Fix the education system, while you're at it.
• Forbid porn, contraception, and abortion. (I don't think that actually helps)
• Deny women access to education beynd elementary school, and additionally forbid employment (likely helps, but at what cost)
• Propaganda. Lots of it. Censorship as well.

How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children?
 

Given modern technology and old style community, raising 5--7 would be a joy, IDK what you're talking about. (Not a parent, could be wrong.)