We need new humans, please help

To add to this, there is nothing mandating that the same number of humans that exist now are required in the future for human civilization to work. Especially, as productivity has gone up in recent decades, humanity could now probably exist at the same level of prosperity of the latter 20th century with half the population it has now.

Maybe we decide each couple should ideally have 1.7 children, maybe 2.3. The point still stands that some children need to be reared and it is, all things being equal, your duty to do your part in this.

The part about especially valuable children was two sentences and meant as a response to a potential objection, not as my main point. Parents in general are getting the kudos in this story, not just parents raising some hypothetical super-babies. [...] I do think the intellectual case for this is strong.

In a world where we worry about overpopulation the case you brought is extremely weak. If you look at a previous discussion on the issue on LW there are two sides: "(1) Overpopulation is one of the most important issues and we have to do more to fight it. (2) We can be confident that the problem solves itself over time."

You are basically claiming that we need more overpopulation without providing arguments why. The only way to fix this is to assume that you aren't really meaning that you want more overpopulation and instead advocate that specific people should procreate.

My argument is more like: If our prior says almost everyone optimizes for Y, and few optimize for X, but many people like to say they optimize for X, and you point to an action A you have taken which increases X and say "Look how I'm optimizing for X!" and A increases Y as well, and there is an obvious alternative B which an X-optimizer would have noticed and which increases X more than A at the cost of not increasing Y, then we've just explained away A as evidence that you optimize for X and should stop privileging that hypothesis.

Edit: one more thing is important here, which is that A is something you'd do if you were optimizing Y, not just something you'd only do if you were jointly optimizing X and Y. You might be thinking "Well, just donate sperm/eggs!". But that is not an option that the Y-agent controlling the Thread Starter really "considers", because the selective forces that shape parental instincts did most of their work before the presence of that option.

Depending on how you define "care", maybe you can care about X without optimizing for it, but that doesn't really matter to me, as that kind of caring doesn't do X any good.

While involving another party does reduce the fraction of involved current humans who are disabled, one current human is still disabled per new human produced.

For most people, even most LWers, I think it will funge mostly against leisure.

That assumes that my leisure time doesn't interact with high-minded projects. Posting on Lesswrong is a leisure activity for myself. While engaging in it I do learn things that are relevant to high-minded project and have a chance to contribute ideas to high-minded projects.

Giving quantified self media interviews is also an activity that you could call leisure by the definition that Wikipedia uses: "Leisure, or free time, is time spent away from business, work, and domestic chores."

I'm in a position where I gave a bunch of those interviews and I did turn down my last interview request for a radio interview.

There are a lot of tasks that do contribute to high-minded projects that you can't do in a way where it's business/work and you get payed for it.

The rich countries are actually rather more overpopulated when you consider the sheer amount of resources we use - rather more than the poorer countries... a single person in a rich nation has many times the resource pull and footprint as one in a poor nation.

Overpopulation isn't a hard line. There's a continuum between 'having enough wealth to go around', and 'oh no, half the population is starving'. In between these two extremes, there are various stages of poverty. One of the first signs of overpopulation is unemployment i.e. too many people and not enough stuff for them to do. Most wealthy countries have comparatively low unemployment rate as of now, but history has shown that things can change swiftly. Just a doubling of the population of the USA would probably be more than enough to cause the unemployment rate to rise significantly.

The world is overpopulated in places like India, China, and especially the "third world". It's not overpopulated in the high infrastructure/education/social and economic capital centers like the US and Western Europe.

There are plenty of people who want to migrate from the third world into the first. If you want more humans in the first world you can just allow migration.

There's plenty of room in countries all over the world, if not in every individual community. We don't have a global overpopulation problem, we have a resource overconsumption problem, which, as CellBioGuy noted, is more concentrated in first world countries than third world.

The solution is not necessarily to reduce consumption, since many material limitations might be circumvented by technological means, but as it stands people in the first world still contribute more to the existing problem than people elsewhere.

It actually seems pretty difficult to see how having children would, on average, be anywhere near as strong an option if your outcome measures are (1) number of children who would otherwise would not exist/reach adulthood and (2) number of children produced using your (presumably much better than donor-average) genetic material.

There are a lot of factors that influence the cost to raise a child (e.g. family income, number of children in a single household), but the USDA's figures suggest that even a relatively low-income family ($0-60k combined household earnings) will be spending ~$175k per child. It's no question that you could redirect that money toward organizations that would save the lives of many children for less.

Gamete donation looks pretty good, too. If you're donating eggs, you probably won't produce many children - IVF success rates are still fairly low, and most donors only produce 10-15 eggs per cycle (although they can donate several times). On the other hand, screening tends to be a lot less discerning for egg donors compared to sperm donors - physical/hereditary health seems to be the primary concern. So if you're exceptionally intelligent, altruistic, and/or happy, it might be much better for your eggs to be put to use than the typical donor's. You can also net $5-15k per cycle, which you could donate toward saving even more children.

If you're donating sperm, you can potentially produce many more children than you could reasonably support as a caregiver (Cryos, apparently the world's largest sperm bank, claims that the "average donor" can expect to father 25 children), but due to slightly more stringent screening, the difference between the quality of your sperm and the average donor's might be a bit less stark. That said, most banks seem to care about things like education and height, which aren't necessarily great proxies for the things most of us care about.

So, assuming you're accepted as a donor and you actually follow through on donating a substantial amount of money, you can with near certainty cause many more children to reach adulthood than you could possibly raise and likely cause a few (or more) children to be born with your genes. All with a substantially lower time investment than you'd expect to sacrifice for child-rearing.

Adjusted for the rates of decline of human population if only a subset of the population ceases creating new humans and the time this gives us until we dip past the civilization-sustaining threshold, then yes, there exists a relatively large subset of humans where the equations balance out to the researchers having enough time to develop anti-aging technology before we reach the deadline.

How large is "large", and exactly how much time that represents, and which exact conditions define the subset of humans, are all yet to be determined (if I knew, I'd take over the world and make it happen!), but I'm rather confident that the number of such humans we could affort to put on Deathward duty is significantly higher than you've previously assumed.

(Partially leaning on the knowledge that human brains tend to fart out and underestimate severely when estimating the impact of large numbers like "6 billion", which you seem to have currently placed on the side where it would increase the number of quality-adjusted humans we produce and, thereby, the time we have until humanfall. )

I cannot.

My time is limited by way of requiring to spend >50 hours / wk on a "self-sustainment" job, a restriction which would only be emboldened by the additional monetary requirements of human-making. The rest of my time can only be alotted to cool projects or human-making; I can not achieve both in sufficient quality to go past the treshold of a failed effort if my available time and resources are divided between the two. One or the other will fail, and probably both if I attempt a standard distribution of resources.

I suspect that many are in similar situations.

(Your point might still stand in a more general case; I've simply attempted to turn it from a discussion of arguments and options to a discussion about ratios of numbers of people matching categories of life situations.)