We clearly agree on your first point (and sorry, I don’t mean to single your comment out too much as a foil, it just came to mind as a recent example of the discourse).
The second strongest reason is if you think childrearing is actually the most cost-effective thing for you to do on the margin because of the effects of the children themselves
I thought about making some back of the envelope EV calculations to this point but it sort of lives or dies on certain assumptions and I didn’t want to make it just an argument about those. But it’s conceivable to me that, for the median EA, raising a child (and trying to instill EA values) would be the most cost effective use of that marginal time. That might be crazy, but I’d like to see different people’s numbers on it.
Again, these are all tentative, but I think my main point in this post is there is something of a collective action problem, where it is more high value (and lower cost) if a lot of EAs to have kids than it is the most cost effective thing for any individual EA having children.
My guess is that having children is far less cost-effective at getting more EAs than university community building, because of far greater reach with the same time and resources from the latter, and not far worse individual counterfactuals. To elaborate on the last point, it’s true that someone who’s never born would not become an EA anyway, but if someone isn’t interested in EA by the time they leave university, it’s not overwhelmingly likely that if they’d have become an EA through university community building, then they would have gotten into EA eventually anyway (and that the gap in time to becoming an EA is small enough in expectation).
A potentially relevant crux here is what you think the discount rate is for EA work (like how much do you value work or donations now vs one year later), from intuition, theory or empiricism. My impression is that some people who look at this think it is >10% (at least in the longtermism and meta spaces).
We clearly agree on your first point (and sorry, I don’t mean to single your comment out too much as a foil, it just came to mind as a recent example of the discourse).
I thought about making some back of the envelope EV calculations to this point but it sort of lives or dies on certain assumptions and I didn’t want to make it just an argument about those. But it’s conceivable to me that, for the median EA, raising a child (and trying to instill EA values) would be the most cost effective use of that marginal time. That might be crazy, but I’d like to see different people’s numbers on it.
Again, these are all tentative, but I think my main point in this post is there is something of a collective action problem, where it is more high value (and lower cost) if a lot of EAs to have kids than it is the most cost effective thing for any individual EA having children.
My guess is that having children is far less cost-effective at getting more EAs than university community building, because of far greater reach with the same time and resources from the latter, and not far worse individual counterfactuals. To elaborate on the last point, it’s true that someone who’s never born would not become an EA anyway, but if someone isn’t interested in EA by the time they leave university, it’s not overwhelmingly likely that if they’d have become an EA through university community building, then they would have gotten into EA eventually anyway (and that the gap in time to becoming an EA is small enough in expectation).
A potentially relevant crux here is what you think the discount rate is for EA work (like how much do you value work or donations now vs one year later), from intuition, theory or empiricism. My impression is that some people who look at this think it is >10% (at least in the longtermism and meta spaces).