As someone who’s spent a lot of time on EA community-building and also on parenting, I’d caution against any strong weighting on “my children will turn out like me / will be especially altruistic.” That seems like a recipe for strained relationships. I think the decision to parent should be made because it’s important to you personally, not because you’re hoping for impact. You can almost certainly have more impact by talking to existing young people about EA or supporting community-building or field-building in some other way than by breeding more people.
I’d also caution against treating adoption as less intensive in time and effort. The process of adopting internationally or from foster care is intensive and often full of uncertainty and disappointment as placements fall through, policies change, etc. And I think the ongoing task of shoring up attachment with an adopted child is significant.(For example, I have a friend who realized her ten-year-old, adopted before he can remember, had somehow developed the belief that his parents would “give him back” at some point and that he was not actually a permanent member of the family. I think this kind of thing is pretty common.) I’d be much more reluctant to travel for work as much as I do if I had adopted children. I think adoption can be really good, but I think it’s important that parents expect it to be an ongoing factor in their relationship with the child, not a one-and-done thing.
A post I wrote on costs: How much do kids cost? The first 5 years—this is less complete than the 18-year estimates, obviously, but it includes lost income which none of the other estimates I’ve seen include.
Strong +1. I was thinking of writing a very similar comment.
A good strategy to me seems to divide your resources into altruistic and personal buckets, decide on their respective sizes and optimise within those buckets. That having children will be one of the best options in the altruistic bucket is pretty unlikely, but it could be much closer to the top in the personal bucket.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time on EA community-building and also on parenting, I’d caution against any strong weighting on “my children will turn out like me / will be especially altruistic.” That seems like a recipe for strained relationships. I think the decision to parent should be made because it’s important to you personally, not because you’re hoping for impact. You can almost certainly have more impact by talking to existing young people about EA or supporting community-building or field-building in some other way than by breeding more people.
I’d also caution against treating adoption as less intensive in time and effort. The process of adopting internationally or from foster care is intensive and often full of uncertainty and disappointment as placements fall through, policies change, etc. And I think the ongoing task of shoring up attachment with an adopted child is significant.(For example, I have a friend who realized her ten-year-old, adopted before he can remember, had somehow developed the belief that his parents would “give him back” at some point and that he was not actually a permanent member of the family. I think this kind of thing is pretty common.) I’d be much more reluctant to travel for work as much as I do if I had adopted children. I think adoption can be really good, but I think it’s important that parents expect it to be an ongoing factor in their relationship with the child, not a one-and-done thing.
A post I wrote on costs:
How much do kids cost? The first 5 years—this is less complete than the 18-year estimates, obviously, but it includes lost income which none of the other estimates I’ve seen include.
Strong +1. I was thinking of writing a very similar comment.
A good strategy to me seems to divide your resources into altruistic and personal buckets, decide on their respective sizes and optimise within those buckets. That having children will be one of the best options in the altruistic bucket is pretty unlikely, but it could be much closer to the top in the personal bucket.