Anna and Oliver discuss Children and X-Risk

I'd like to see discussion of data rather than mostly a priori argument ("I have a sense" ... "I suspect desire"). For aggregate data, there's SSC survey and there are studies of "ambitious" groups (e.g. the Harvard Men study, Benbow on precious math talent). There are also anecdata of the exceptionally ambitious. E.g. Musk had first child age ~30 and has many kids, Hassabis had first child aged ~29. It seems Jaan Tallinn had kids starting in his 20s before founding Skype (Wikipedia). Bezos has 4 kids (started age 37). Gates has 3 kids (started age ~40). Turing award-winners David Patterson and Judea Pearl had kids in their 20s before their biggest contributions. Yoshua Bengio in his 30s. etc
 

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2021-02-28T02:04:46.197Z · ? · GW

I found this analysis one of the most useful I have found: https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/64B/6/767/550078

Abstract: 

Compared with married parents, childless married couples tend to have slightly more income and about 5% more wealth. Unmarried childless men enjoy no income advantage over unmarried fathers but have 24%–33% more wealth. Compared with older unmarried mothers, unmarried childless women have 12%–31% more income and about 33% more wealth. The strength of these relationships increases as one moves up the distribution of income or wealth.

At the higher levels of wealth, the effects become quite strong. 

And when I looked at random datasets like "what percentage of famous scientists according to this one random collection of biographies of scientists are married?" I found about 27% of them to be unmarried, which is a stark increase from about 15% population average. Traditional marriage here is used as a proxy for having children, partially because I think they have effects via the same mechanisms, and partially because they are heavily correlated.

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2021-02-28T02:06:59.130Z · ? · GW

There is also this paper, which aims to show that as soon as great scientists marry, they very quickly stop producing great achievements, but something about it irks me out and I don't currently put a ton of weight on it: 

Replies from: Owain_Evans

↑ comment by Owain_Evans · 2021-02-28T09:17:02.753Z · ? · GW

I haven't re-read the paper, although IIRC there are critiques online of this paper and the author's other statistical analyses. How strong do you think the evidence is for the counterfactual "If person has chooses to have kids, their chance of major achievement will drop substantially" (for a range of different people)? Ideally there'd be natural experiments (due to infertility or someone who didn't want kids raising their sibling's children etc). 
 

These graphs aren't that different and (I'd guess) it wouldn't be hard to p-hack to get the intended result. Rate of being unmarried will vary over time and with country and this will correlate with age of achievements (e.g. if people in biology peak later than math/physics, if there's more biologists in UK and math/physics people in Germany and Italy). And there's the causal / counterfactual inference.. 

Replies from: habryka4

↑ comment by habryka (habryka4) · 2021-02-28T18:38:41.326Z · ? · GW

I am pretty confused on this, and as I said above, don't put much weight on this study because I also have some sense that the author isn't super trustworthy (though I haven't found any critique of this specific paper). 

Overall, my current sense is that the effect on women in particular is quite strong, and women who choose to have children will reduce their chance of major achievement by at least 40% or so. For men it's probably weaker, and I am a lot less sure what the data says. 

Not sure whether this is the right place to leave this comment, but:

I feel that having children increases my motivation to work on X-risk. Because, even if the timeline is s.t. it won't affect me personally, it can still affect my children (and is even more likely to affect my grandchildren if I will have any). That said, it definitely reduces the flexibility of e.g. giving up on income or moving to another country.

Two complementary pro-natalist considerations I'd like to see discussed:

• Eugenics! It doesn't seem like there are any technical barriers [LW(p) · GW(p)] to embryo selection for IQ today. If longtermist parents disproportionately become early adopters of this tech in the 2020s, could that help their children be a disproportionate share of up-and-coming AI researchers in the 2040s?

• Escaping our Society's memetic collapse [LW · GW]. We are the children of a memetic brood-parasite strategy. It's a lot easier to recruit new longtermists out of universal culture than it is from Mormonism, but universal culture triumphed not because its adherents had more children than everyone else, but by capturing the school and media institutions that socialize everyone else's children: horizontal meme transmission rather than vertical. If social-media-era universal culture is no longer as conducive to Reason as its 20th-century strain, maybe we need to switch to a more Mormon-like strategy (homeschooling, &c.) if we want there to be top reasoners in the 2040s.

Belatedly, I did a bit of outside-view research on the time and monetary costs of kids (though a couple parent friends kindly sanity-checked some of it). I presented it at my house's internal conference, but some folks suggested I share more broadly in case it's helpful to others: here is the slide deck. The assumptions are Bay Area, upper-middle-class parents (e.g. both programmers or something like that) who both want to keep their careers and are therefore willing to pay a lot for childcare.

FWIW: a lot of my motivation (in general) stems from my love of my future children.

This was perhaps my favorite weekend event that we’ve done, both for the main event and the many hours of conversation afterward.

I’ll see if I can get the time to write up some of the thoughts and ideas I got from the discussion and put it into a post.

Is there a recording/transcript/anything to watch after-the-fact?

Acquiring/sharing data sounds good, but I am not personally planning to look at it before Sunday. Maybe someone else wishes to do this, and to bring it to the discussion? Relatedly, there are other good points here that I probably won't manage to personally go into -- maybe Oliver does, but if not, maybe we can have a discussion format that allows other people to also give short spiels/etc., and maybe if some are motivated to share such they can come with these? I am not sure what Ray and Oliver have planned.

guesses: 1. in most cases, children on net detract from other major projects for common-sense time/attention/optionality management reasons (as well as because they sometimes commit people to a world view of relatively slow change), 2. whether to have children isn't each other's business and pressure against doing normal human things like this is net socially harmful (conservatives in particular are alienated by a culture of childlessness, though maybe that's net strategically useful), 3. people conflate 2 with not-1 on an emotional level and feel 1 is false because 2 is true

Depending on your evaluation of AI timelines, children of AI-conscious parents have a much higher chance of being AI-conscious, so consider having kids a long-term investment in AI research...

I suspect the desire for kids/lineage is really basic for a lot of people (almost everyone?)

This seems like an important point. One of the arguments for the inner alignment [? · GW] problem is that evolution intended to select humans for inclusive genetic fitness (IGF) but humans were instead motivated by other goals (e.g. seeking sex) that were strongly correlated with IGF in the ancestral environment.

Then when humans' environment changed (e.g. the invention of birth control), the correlation between these proxy goals and IGF broke down resulting in low fitness and inner misalignment.

However this statement seems to suggest that modern humans really have internalized IGF as one of their primary objectives and that they're inner aligned with evolution's outer objective.