Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️ comments on Ask Me Anything about parenting as an Effective Altruist

[Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️]

It’s not a question but just thought it’d be nice to share the perspective of somebody who decided not to have children. Always nice to showcase a wide range of views and decisions. Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Julia Wise about it. Can read the whole thing here.

“I super, super wanted kids. I didn’t want kids when I was younger, and then when I was about 20 I was in the park, minding my own business and a little toddler toddled up to me and he gave me this bent daisy. And my brain exploded! I was like, “Oh my God, I need babies now.”

I just became absolutely obsessed. EA was my number one priority, and the next one was kids. I actually had a blog about parenting. I was reading all these books about it, reading studies and figuring out exactly how to deal with pregnancy and everything. I’d sit out outside of playgrounds and do my homework next to the playground so I could watch the kids play, just be around them.

Then I was like: impact. I decided that I wasn’t going to have kids because of impact. And that was the worst. For the longest time, this was the closest I ever felt to giving up because I just felt so resentful.

Every time I saw a kid, I just felt so horrible. I was like, why the fuck am I doing this? I don’t even know if anything’s working. And this is so important to me.

Julia: What kind of effects were you thinking about on your impact?

Kat: The main thing is just time and energy. Basically every spare amount of energy I had was going towards impact. So there was no room for kids. Any extra thing that I took on as a responsibility, it was definitely just going to have to come from the “helping the world” budget.

Then I just felt bad all the time. The thing that made me realize that I would actually have kids was realizing: I just have to have one willpower break. I just have to have a willpower break long enough to have a kid, and then it’s over. Then I was like, well, I’m probably going to have the willpower break anyway, so might as well just plan accordingly.

Goal factoring and practical experience

Kat: So then me and my husband at the time were planning on having kids. But it was never the right time. I thought, maybe I’ll do the goal factoring. I came up with this spreadsheet. I came up with a whole bunch of different options that you could do. I basically broke down, what are the things I want about children and what are the things that [my partner] wants about children? Because those are different. And then I came up with a whole bunch of like alternatives. Like what about a dog? What about fostering? Volunteering a lot with kids? All sorts of stuff. And that was to tide me over until we could have kids, and maybe find something that didn’t require as much time investment.

Then we stumbled on babysitting. Oh man, I get to spend time with the kids and develop this relationship with them. But also I get paid for it. Amazing!

I babysat three separate sets of kids, and they were all perfectly ordinary kids. They were not kids with behavior problems or anything like that. But that was enough for me to realize: oh, I do not want to be a parent. I do not want children at all.

I’d had experience with kids before. I’d been a summer camp leader. I’d worked with 30 plus kids at a time for a whole summer, that sort of stuff. And I loved it, but what I realized when I babysat was that I was just the fun summer camp leader. I went and played games with them, and it’s fun to play with kids. Playing with kids is the best.

But putting them to bed? Holy shit. Why is it so hard!? I’d read all the books and I was like, oh, I’ll appeal to intrinsic motivation and reason. Nope, does not work. Very quickly I ended up bribing them. I was like, I will give you candy if you go to bed, please.

Two things that happened:

The kid who I babysat the most, the first day I came, he was like, let’s make potions. I was like, yeah, let’s make potions! It’s really fun. The next time I came, he’s like, let’s make potions. I was like, oh, we made potions last time. How about we do something different? He’s like “POTIONS!” Okay, fine. And then it was potions again. And potions again. And I was like, wow, this was fun the first time. And now this is really irritating. I just can’t convince him to do anything else.

The other thing was one time I was there when his mom was still there and he was eating some cereal at the table. He’s five, right? and he had said something that was kind of racist or sexist, I forget what it was.

And the mom was just perfect. She had clearly read all the parenting books, and she just responded in the most perfect way. She gave this great speech about how to think about it.

And I was like, wow, you gave a really good metaphor there, this is so inspiring, you’re such a good mom!

And the kid just looked up and was like, “Mom, I want more sugar.” He didn’t care at all. He was not listening. He just wanted more dopamine.

I was like, ah, it’s just so destroying.

I want to be that sort of mom. I want to impart important wisdom and stuff. Obviously I’m sure eventually he’s going to grow up to not be bad or anything. He’s just five and it takes time. But argh!

So then I ended up not wanting kids at all — I totally switched. It went from my system one was like, “I want kids,” but my system two was like, “I don’t want them,” to now both of them are in complete agreement.

I still like playing with kids. Occasionally I’ll get this little twinge, like, aw, they’re so cute. But just give it five minutes. Almost always within five minutes, they’ll do something really annoying. And I’ll be like: ah yes, this is why I don’t want them.

I think the lesson from this that I took away is that before you have kids, it’s really good to get some babysitting experience. It’s a really good way to cheaply test being as close to being a parent as you can be without actually being a parent, that’s pretty available to most people. Once you have them, you can’t go back, there’s no “I’ve changed my mind.””

Full post here. Also Jeff wrote about why he disagrees with my conclusions here.

And thanks for posting this AMA! Such a useful thing for the community.

[Geoffrey Miller]

Kat—thanks very much for this detailed and helpful comment.

I think you exemplify the kind of decision strategy I’m urging EAs to use in figuring out whether to have kids: treat it as a serious, high-stakes research project, gather a lot of diverse data, insights, and experiences, consider the fit to one’s own life-goals and personality traits, consult with others who have done it (and not done it), consider best-case, worst-case, and likely median outcomes, etc.

Often, the answer will be ‘I should have kids’, but often the answer will be ‘nope’.

Also thanks for linking to your full post, and to Jeff Kaufman’s reply, which I largely agree with his comments, which I’ll expand upon here. IMHO, three big ways that ‘babysitting as a parenting trial’ doesn’t quite work are that

(1) it feels qualitatively different to care for one’s own biological children than other people’s kids, partly because your own kids will be more genetically and phenotypically similar to you (not just in appearance, but in personality and cognitive traits, quirks, preferences, values, etc) than unrelated kids are, partly because your kids will also resemble whatever lover/​spouse/​partner you scrambled your genes with, and partly because the process of becoming a parent (being pregnant, giving birth, bonding with baby) activates a whole suite of evolved adaptations for parenting that depend on complex hormonal, epigenetic, and maturation pathways that basically rewire one’s brain from non-parent mode into parent mode.

(2) babysitters don’t have nearly as much authority and autonomy as parents in determining a kid’s daily routine, schedule, feeding, clothing, discipline strategies, training strategies, household setup, etc., so parenting offers much broader scope for deciding over the longer term how to arrange one’s life to optimize child care

(3) child care has a difficult and frustrating learning curve, so the first few hours (of first few hundreds of hours) of child care as a beginner aren’t representative of how one can do child care as an expert (which most parents become by the time their kids are toddlers). Think of all the things you hated at first as a newbie, but learned to love. For example, the first two days of learning to ski or snowboard absolutely suck. You fall over a lot, it’s awkward and scary, your muscles get exhausted, you get cold and wet, you can’t pay attention to anything fun or scenic about the experience. But then skiing gets awesome from about days three onwards, and you suddenly understand why so many people enjoy it. Same with the first few experiences of public speaking, or the first few dates, or dances, or posts on EA Forum. It can be quite hard to predict how expert-level performance will feel from a few hours of beginner-level experience. (Not that this applies to Kat, who has a lot of babysitting experience; it’s more of a cautionary point for EAs who think ‘I’ll just try babysitting my niece for a couple of hours are use that experience to update my probability of having kids.’)

Another factor I haven’t mentioned elsewhere is the issue of giving one’s parents grandkids. I grew up in a very pronatalist family; my grandparents had 12 kids, and I have 30 cousins. I always felt a very strong traditionalist, almost deontological imperative to give my own parents grand-kids that they could enjoy, and not to let their bloodline die out with me. I figured, they’d made huge sacrifices to raise me, and I had a moral duty to them to have some kids of my own.

That might sound weird to some EAs, but think of it an analogous to an AI alignment problem. My parents invested a lot in creating and training me as a little AGI, partly (from an evolutionary perspective) so that I could create and train my own little AGIs in turn. They tried to train me as a good future parent, who had pronatalist values. If I’d decided not to have kids, that would represent a catastrophic alignment failure, from their point of view. And I felt, as a good AGI who felt some moral obligation to my creators, that I shouldn’t just drift away from their values—including the crucial value of becoming grandparents. Of course, in modern societies there’s often a strong taboo against parents of adult kids putting much pressure on their kids to produce grandkids. But very few parents of adult kids will be delighted if their kids say ‘Sorry, mom and dad, maximizing total future sentient utility in the cosmic light-cone is more important to me than continuing your bloodlines or letting you ever enjoy playing with grandkids’.

This doesn’t mean that one’s parents reproductive priorities should always over-ride one’s own rational goals. But it does suggest that talking with one’s parents (and siblings, and other family stakeholders) might be wise in deciding about the issue of having kids. Some parents might truly not care about grandkids (although this is probably quite rare); some might care a lot, and might suffer bitter, permanent disappointment if they don’t get grandkids. This is just something that’s worth weighing, in terms of aggregate family utility rather than one’s individual utility.

[Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️]

I generally agree and think that babysitting shouldn’t be your only source of evidence, for reasons like what you describe. Ideally, you should use a bunch of different threads of evidence, including babysitting, getting a pet, talking to parents, research, etc.

Unfortunately, the only way to really tell is to actually do it, but that is too costly because then there’s no turning back.

Two things to keep in mind though:

1 . Taking a pill to enjoy drudgery

On the “you’ll feel differently when it’s your own child” argument. This argument feels strange to me. Imagine some sort of drudgery you hate (e.g. filing taxes or cleaning the toilet). Imagine there’s a pill that makes it feel like that’s the most meaningful and enjoyable thing ever, and it will make you prioritize it over your existing values and spend millions of dollars on it and tens of thousands of hours on it for the rest of your life. People who take the pill say they love it and would never go back.

Would you take the pill?

Some people might because hey, what matters is things feeling meaningful. I wouldn’t, because I don’t want to add a competing goal thread in mind to compete with my current existing values, no matter how much I’d enjoy it later. (This of course doesn’t address things like the learning curve you mentioned)

2. Parents give biased answers

Asking parents gives you a biased view because it’s hard for parents to psychologically admit that they made a mistake, let alone tell somebody about it. It would just cause too much suffering on their part and would also make them a worse parent.

And it’s more common than you think. I can’t find it now, but I remember a survey I read saying that ~10% of parents regretted having children, and that’s definitely an understimate, because there’s such social desirability bias and most people can’t even admit it to themselves.

To help counter that, I recommend checking out https://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​regretfulparents/​​ and watching The Letdown (a funny and as far as I can tell, decently accurate view of the downsides of being a parent).

Of course, look at both sides. You can also read Selfish Reasons to Have Kids and talk to parents.

[Geoffrey Miller]

Kat—these are both fair points. But they do cut both ways....

Taking a pill to avoid being miserable while doing drudgery sounds quite self-manipulative and self-deceptive. But the epigenetic, hormonal, and neural maturation that happens with having kids is somewhat analogous to the changes that happen with puberty.

Imagine going through puberty was not the default, but was voluntary and based on taking a pill. If a 12-year-old is offered a pill that makes them gradually become sexually mature, so they’ll spend huge amount of time, energy, and money for the next 60 years chasing sexual relationships, and thinking that was super meaningful and rewarding, rather than doing cool stuff that kids enjoy, how many would take the puberty-pill? They might think that sexual maturation, which makes all this tedious mating effort, dating, and relationship-investment seem rewarding, is really just self-deceptive nonsense. They might just decide that staying asexual is so much more efficient....

Giving biased answers based on self-deception is a valid concern. However, it cuts both ways. It’s also an issue with people who say they’re perfectly happy not having kids, that they regret nothing, that they were right in prioritizing their careers and having fun, etc. It’s very hard to run the counterfactual across completely different, irreversible life-trajectories.

I agree with your point that it’s important for EAs to gather converging evidence from multiple kinds of sources, from talking with one’s own parents to reading books to diving into the stats about life-satisfaction.

[Jeff Kaufman 🔸]

With your puberty example, I expect I would have passed up the pill at the time and remained asexual. Whether that would have been the right choice is a lot harder to figure out...

[Geoffrey Miller]

Jeff—these examples, of whether to pass through puberty, and whether to become a parent, raise some profound issues (a la Derek Parfit) about the continuity of personal identity. They’re basically about decisions about whether to become a new person, and they’re basically irreversible. So, yes, it’s very hard to know whether such a profound change is ‘the right choice’… because it’s a choice that basically extinguishes the person making the choice, and creates a new person who’s stuck with the choice.

Which can sound very scary, or very liberating and transformative, depending on one’s risk tolerance.

[Kat Woods 🔶 ⏸️]

Also, when it comes to having more control over the raising of the child, you need to take into account that there’s a decently high probability you’ll get divorced from your current partner, at which point you’ll only have semi-control and have to share that with somebody who might be quite hostile to you.

[Geoffrey Miller]

There’s a standard saying that ‘half of all marriages end in divorce’. That’s an outdated overestimate, and the divorce rate is much, much higher for people who don’t graduate college, and who are pregnant/​have a kid before getting married.

Among women with a college education, at least 78% of marriage last at least 20 years.

This number is probably even higher if they wait til after college graduation to get married, if they aren’t pregnant/​have a kid before marriage, if they don’t cohabit for a long time before marriage, and if they’re reasonably high in agreeableness, and low in neuroticism