I would strongly recommend doing some serious research and thinking about this issue now, while you’re 30. Partly to plan ahead and prioritize, partly to get clarity before getting seriously involved with a partner (who will probably want that clarity up front!), partly to be able to empathize more effectively with both parents and non-parents, in terms of the tradeoffs they’ve faced. Being male does buy you a bit more elbow room in terms of reproductive timing; you could potentially wait until your 50s. Mutation load in sperm does slightly increase with age, but it’s not a very big effect. Energy for parenting does slightly decrease with age, but not that quickly if you stay in shape.
In my experience, and among male friends and colleagues, it’s fairly rare for guys to have a strong, specific desire to have kids, at least until they meet a woman who seems exciting to have kids with. Evolution seems to have figured that if we have a sex drive and good mate choice, we don’t need a specific desire for kids. Contraception makes that heuristic less effective now.
Regarding sperm donation, I think it’s a very sensible thing to do, if you qualify; I think it’s ethical to allow any resulting kids to contact you when they’re a teen if they want to. I think raising one’s own kids is often significantly more rewarding than raising adopted kids, just because one’s own kids will share so much more of one’s cognitive traits, personality traits, quirks, etc, that you can empathize better with them.
The pronatalism argument is something I should write about in more detail later. I don’t think that reproducing oneself just in order to maximize total number of geniuses is that compelling an argument—one could ‘offset’ genius-reproduction by encouraging other smart people to have kids, promoting pronatalism, etc.
However, I do think there are some specific benefits of becoming a parent, especially for someone working on AI alignment: (1) you get a LOT of insights into how learning works, if you view babies and kids as little ‘machine learning systems’, and if you read some developmental psychology, (2) you become much more longtermist and future-oriented, personally concerned about the fate of your kids and future grandkids, and more strongly motivated to minimize X risks, (3) you get a lot more credibility with parents when discussing X risks, longtermism, alignment, etc—they don’t want to be reassured that ‘AGI will be safe, trust us!’ or ‘AGI is a big danger that deserves more attention, trust us!’ by childless people with no skin in the game.
I think raising one’s own kids is often significantly more rewarding than raising adopted kids, just because one’s own kids will share so much more of one’s cognitive traits, personality traits, quirks, etc, that you can empathize better with them.
I’m extremelyskeptical of this claim. Many parents I know with multiple biological children report that they have immensely different personalities, and it seems intuitively obvious that any statistical correlations of such traits between child and parent that are driven by genes will be overwhelmed by statistical noise in a family with an n of, say, 3 or fewer children. As someone with two biological children, IMHO almost all of the rewarding aspects of being a parent come from the experience of watching them grow up on a daily basis and directly contributing to that growth, not from picking out physical or other characteristics that happen to remind me of myself.
One confounding factor here is that the children that you might potentially adopt are pretty different from the children you might have biologically. Most adoptees have gone through some form of trauma, they are rarely newborns, they often had worse prenatal environments, their biological parents probably wouldn’t enjoy the forum, etc.
I think if somehow one of my children had been swapped at birth with a child from similar parents it probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on what raising them would be like, but that’s not really what we’re talking about?
(I do also think it’s cute the various more specific ways our kids resemble us, but I agree this is not a major contribution to the experience of parenting.)
I think this is slightly overstating things—I’m not sure of the numbers as the statistics I’ve found online seem inconsistant, but it looks like the majority of private adoptions, and >10% of all adoptions, are newborns.
Cornelis—very thoughtful questions.
I would strongly recommend doing some serious research and thinking about this issue now, while you’re 30. Partly to plan ahead and prioritize, partly to get clarity before getting seriously involved with a partner (who will probably want that clarity up front!), partly to be able to empathize more effectively with both parents and non-parents, in terms of the tradeoffs they’ve faced. Being male does buy you a bit more elbow room in terms of reproductive timing; you could potentially wait until your 50s. Mutation load in sperm does slightly increase with age, but it’s not a very big effect. Energy for parenting does slightly decrease with age, but not that quickly if you stay in shape.
In my experience, and among male friends and colleagues, it’s fairly rare for guys to have a strong, specific desire to have kids, at least until they meet a woman who seems exciting to have kids with. Evolution seems to have figured that if we have a sex drive and good mate choice, we don’t need a specific desire for kids. Contraception makes that heuristic less effective now.
Regarding sperm donation, I think it’s a very sensible thing to do, if you qualify; I think it’s ethical to allow any resulting kids to contact you when they’re a teen if they want to. I think raising one’s own kids is often significantly more rewarding than raising adopted kids, just because one’s own kids will share so much more of one’s cognitive traits, personality traits, quirks, etc, that you can empathize better with them.
The pronatalism argument is something I should write about in more detail later. I don’t think that reproducing oneself just in order to maximize total number of geniuses is that compelling an argument—one could ‘offset’ genius-reproduction by encouraging other smart people to have kids, promoting pronatalism, etc.
However, I do think there are some specific benefits of becoming a parent, especially for someone working on AI alignment: (1) you get a LOT of insights into how learning works, if you view babies and kids as little ‘machine learning systems’, and if you read some developmental psychology, (2) you become much more longtermist and future-oriented, personally concerned about the fate of your kids and future grandkids, and more strongly motivated to minimize X risks, (3) you get a lot more credibility with parents when discussing X risks, longtermism, alignment, etc—they don’t want to be reassured that ‘AGI will be safe, trust us!’ or ‘AGI is a big danger that deserves more attention, trust us!’ by childless people with no skin in the game.
I’m extremely skeptical of this claim. Many parents I know with multiple biological children report that they have immensely different personalities, and it seems intuitively obvious that any statistical correlations of such traits between child and parent that are driven by genes will be overwhelmed by statistical noise in a family with an n of, say, 3 or fewer children. As someone with two biological children, IMHO almost all of the rewarding aspects of being a parent come from the experience of watching them grow up on a daily basis and directly contributing to that growth, not from picking out physical or other characteristics that happen to remind me of myself.
One confounding factor here is that the children that you might potentially adopt are pretty different from the children you might have biologically. Most adoptees have gone through some form of trauma, they are rarely newborns, they often had worse prenatal environments, their biological parents probably wouldn’t enjoy the forum, etc.
I think if somehow one of my children had been swapped at birth with a child from similar parents it probably wouldn’t have much of an impact on what raising them would be like, but that’s not really what we’re talking about?
(I do also think it’s cute the various more specific ways our kids resemble us, but I agree this is not a major contribution to the experience of parenting.)
I think this is slightly overstating things—I’m not sure of the numbers as the statistics I’ve found online seem inconsistant, but it looks like the majority of private adoptions, and >10% of all adoptions, are newborns.