Rationality and being child-free

I've wondered in the past if perhaps the best thing LW members could do if the singularity is more than 80 (4 generations) years away was simply to breed like Amish and adopt values of having many kids in the very late teens and early twenties early, focusing on higher education in the middling twenties and then after fifty spending most time on grandchildren whose parents followed the same patter and focus their late 20s and 30s on other goals.

Historical (Amish) population:

• 1920 5,000
• 1944 13,000
• 1976 57,000
• 1992 125,000
• 2010 249,000

People underestimate just how much "dumb" replication can do to carry memes forward.

Edit: LW's help for a list of items is a bit confusing. If I remove item * in front of "historical Amish populations" from the above, the readable list of dates and population numbers collapses into a single poorly readable line. Can anyone explain this a bit further for me?

I realised early on I wanted children, and now I have one. (Watching this small intelligence develop is utterly riveting.) I'd like another, my girlfriend already has two others and really doesn't want a fourth!

This is not something that came from a rational decision. The desire came first, so the job of instrumental rationality as far as I was concerned was to make this work.

For those who have some desire for children but can't rationally make that work: may I strongly suggest sperm or egg donation. In the UK, they're terribly short of donor gametes (a shortage of over 200 donors a year), and having smart, rational people donate would probably be a net win for the gene pool at little personal cost (more faff in the case of eggs). If your sperm or eggs cope with freezing, you will reproduce.

If you're worried about your offspring being cast to the four winds, I wouldn't be too concerned - I was adopted, and it worked out I think because I was quite definitely wanted, not an accident. The children of your sperm or eggs will be very much wanted. It gives women the hitherto-unavailable option of passing on their genes with someone else doing the work of pregnancy.

And if the singularity takes more than twenty years, you'll have added a human of higher intelligence to the population.

It strikes me as on-topic for a blog about rationality to describe my thinking processes concerning working out why I wanted children.

The urge is eminently biologically plausible - I come from a long line of successful replicators, after all. And just because this manifests itself as "I want sex" doesn't mean I don't also want the abstract result of sex. I also like the idea of bringing up a child.

But I had to justify the urge to myself, as the social circle I found myself in (punk-descended indie rock in Perth in the 1980s) tended to be very negative about having children. A few people had them, but many were powerfully negative about children, considering humans to be a curse upon the world, an ecological disaster, and the world to be too horrible to bring children into.

(This was the last decade of the Cold War, the feeling of which I find almost impossible to actually explain to almost anyone under thirty. We were young, but we seriously expected we could die with minutes of notice and were powerless to stop such a thing happening. It makes for good punk rock, but doesn't seem to me to have been a healthy environment.)

So I had to come up with rational justifications of my feelings. Of course, this sort of justification backwards from the predetermined outcome is highly improper. But it did come up with useful ideas for me to then attempt to play forward and examine closely: "my children will be an improvement in the world" (which I think is true) and "the world is not in fact awful, it's the best it's ever been" (which I also think was true and has continued to be true). This and "and anyway, I actually want to" was sufficient for me.

Note here that my thinking was not particularly clear (e.g. I privileged the hypothesis terribly), only sufficiently clear to satisfy me as to my own rightness in thinking differently to others around me. I am certainly not advocating the above as a model of how to think well, but as a case study in inchoate attempts at rational thinking about something personally important.

(And, by the way, many of those who expressed such opinions concerning children have since reproduced themselves.)

I've seen these sort of claims before and I've never seen a plausible rejoinder to the issue of correlation v. causation. In particular, unhappy people may actually be more likely to have children for some reason. The most obvious way to test this is to repeatedly ask how happy people are and see if it drops when some of them have kids.

Cultural and developmental factors (some people being more likely both to be rational and not want kids for external reasons) are going to swamp pure "rationality" on this subject. Which means we don't have a control group, or even a particularly clear idea of what a control group would look like.

So I agree with David Gerard's more introspective approach - the most rational thing to do seems to be to figure out exactly what we think we know about having children vis a vis our ideas of what would be a good idea.

So, doing just that: my main rational aversion to having kids is that it takes a lot of time, and I value my time pretty highly. My main emotional aversion (emotional reasons tending to be deceptively powerful) is that raising a kid seems like it would require things that I am utterly unprepared for - by which I mostly mean social skills, I'm not scared of changing a diaper. I could learn them, almost certainly, but that doesn't dissolve the feeling of unpreparedness.

Upon introspection, maybe I just don't think kids are as interesting as other people do because I connect with people on a mainly intellectual level, which would be a general argument. But that depends on the child - I probably would find my past self likeable and my past activities interesting-ish above age 8. But still, maybe other people find doing things like watching kids' soccer games enjoyable where I would bring a book.

As for the good parts, the best seems to be that you get to make a new person. Possibly a cool person, who makes you feel a sense of pride and love every time you see them. I'd probably learn all those skills I mentioned, and plenty more that I wasn't even thinking of. I'd understand people better. I'd have someone to take care of me in my old age, which could be nice even if my old age doesn't involve a dying body.

I suppose I'm still undecided.

I have a child, and plan on having more - both because I like kids, and because it's the right thing to do.

Evidence that children make parents less happy won't make me change my mind any more than learning that I would be happy by wireheading, taking drugs or becoming a Christian.

Many people seem to be arguing abut the effects on happiness. I'm not too concerned about that to be honest. The negative effect on happiness doesn't seem radical and child outcomes aren't that much effected by parental upbringing beyond a minimum once one disentangles the data from genetics so I'm not to worried about responsibility, especially since I think that by the early 20s he is as much a independent agent as anyone today and I don't feel (yes horrible word) like someone else is responsible for my actions. Financial independence is another issue, however again genetics will play a large role in reducing my child's risk for some kinds of poor decisions so really my decisions should mostly be based on my genes.

Not everything that I do pursuing my values will make me happy, especially if some of my values can't really be lived up to by humans.

If one day I notice that I want to have children, I will have to weigh that against well-supported research that shows having children decreases happiness. Even if I feel that I very strongly want children, I would consider that to be very weak evidence that I would go on feeling so for 20-30 years (time needed to raise child to independence). The evidence of the research would be more weighty than my own feelings.

(Anecdotally, what I actually feel is that having children is utterly horrible.)

One could argue that it would result in a net happiness, as children tend to help their parents when they get older. My parents helped grandfather's medical needs, and probably extended his life by about 5 years.

There is no such concept as "rationality/happiness".

And this is why theists always outnumber atheists.

I'd like to see more detail about the claim that having children is likely to make people less happy-- in particular, whether it makes the vast majority of people less happy, or whether it makes some people unhappy, and leaves others at the same happiness level or perhaps even makes them happier. If it's the latter (and I suspect it is) then rationalists would have a better chance of evaluating whether having children is likely to improve their lives, and more generally, there would be ways to find out how to make it easier for parents to enjoy having children.