Thanks for this detail! Yeah, I agree that encouraging/supporting people having kids is a more effective approach, and that other things matter more from a total longtermist perspective. (In particular, if human extinction does occur in the near term, then factory farming plausibly outweighs everything good we’ve ever done. Either way, we have much to catch up on.)
To be more precise on the question, do you think that with all else equal, choosing to have a child is better than choosing to abort, assuming that the child will live a net good life (in expectation)? (This is what I was trying to capture with the word “intrinsic”—without accounting for concerns of norms, opportunity costs, other interventions dominating, etc i.e. as a unitary yes-or-no decision.)
Your advice on optimization is definitely correct, and I have many regrets about the framing of this post, some of which I enumerate here.
Thanks for this detail! Yeah, I agree that encouraging/supporting people having kids is a more effective approach, and that other things matter more from a total longtermist perspective. (In particular, if human extinction does occur in the near term, then factory farming plausibly outweighs everything good we’ve ever done. Either way, we have much to catch up on.)
To be more precise on the question, do you think that with all else equal, choosing to have a child is better than choosing to abort, assuming that the child will live a net good life (in expectation)? (This is what I was trying to capture with the word “intrinsic”—without accounting for concerns of norms, opportunity costs, other interventions dominating, etc i.e. as a unitary yes-or-no decision.)
Your advice on optimization is definitely correct, and I have many regrets about the framing of this post, some of which I enumerate here.