Anna and Oliver discuss Children and X-Risk

I looked at the 2020 Forbes list of most powerful women (which was the first thing that came up when I googled "powerful women") and spent about an hour total investigating whether they have children. The Forbes list had 100 women; I was able to find probably-reliable information about children for 95 of them (many of them are very private about their personal lives, which is reasonable). Of those, 25 were childless, or 26%.

This source indicates that 85% of women in the US have children in their lifetime – a lot of the women in question weren't from the US, but I'm not putting that much effort into the investigation, so close enough. So that's 26% of successful women being childless, vs the US average of 15%. Also (cherry-picking alert), out of the top three women on the list, two were childless (Angela Merkel and Kamala Harris). 

I'm also curious if Oliver or Anna think there's a difference between EA longtermist endeavors vs. the reference class you've drawn from ("scoring very highly on broadly accepted metrics of success"), and if so, how that difference manifests itself for having children. 

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.

↑ 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. 

My impression from many, many biographies of ambitious and world-changing people is that historically significant politicians and entrepreneurs nearly always have kids, to such an overwhelming extent that >50% of exceptions are biologically infertile or are gay. Among historically significant scientists, engineers, and philosophers, most have kids, but it's not nearly so overpowering and I'm not immediately sure if it's different from what you'd expect of baseline "successful people".

Of course this is purely descriptive rather than mechanistic, but there's overwhelming mountains of data suggesting that world-changing impact is at least consistent with having kids, and in some fields, being the-sort-of-person-who-chooses-to-have-kids seems like it's nearly a prerequisite.

Borlaug was a super absentee parent, his wife did everything herself and he (presumably) sent back cash while globetrotting. How many of these ambitious people with kids aren't super involved in their kids' lives?

I hope you find the time. I hadn't realised this was happening and would be interested in any thoughts and ideas. It's an issue that's high impact, broadly relevant, hard to get good data and easy to reason poorly about - so I'm glad to see some thoughtful discussion.

There is not – it was a kinda delicate conversation and we decided it was better for Oli and Anna and everyone else to feel free to speak out loud. I also think much of the value was sort of a meandering sussing out of fuzzy positions that's just actually kinda hard to get if you weren't there at the time.

That said, one participant said they might write up some followup thoughts, that serve as something of a distillation.

Overall my guess was "Anna and Oliver chat 1-on-1 for an hour, and then we open it up to other questions, without too much structure", but I also didn't have a strong sense of what would work best and kinda defer to whatever Anna and Oliver are excited by. 

(In the world where neither Anna nor Oliver have a strong opinion, the default is "Hour of discussion after which Ray moderates some Q&A for awhile using his judgment, including making a call about whether it should remain one giant Zoom conversation or moving over to a Walled Garden afterparty where people can break into multiple groups")