Do you think I should spend effort and research and care about the particulars of having kids ahead of time even though I largely perceive myself as possibly/probably never wanting to have kids? It certainly seems reasonable to strongly expect I might eventually fully change my mind about having kids just because having kids is—well—genetically mandated and such. Preparing and planning now seems like a wise hedge against my lack of desire to have kids right now?
I am a 30 year old male now and am still sorta mostly leaning towards not having kids. Is that normally a sign that this is how I should expect my psychology to be throughout my thirties and forties? And I should just not sweat it and continue to focus on studying AI Alignment?
Secondly, do you think there is a good pronatalist argument to be made that an EA that doesn’t feel like they want kids should still regardless have kids? I’ve heard the “in expectation if EAs all have kids we’ll get more geniuses—low prob. in each case, but such high potential impact that we ought to have kids” argument. I take this line of thinking seriously, but I still find it hard to think that this argument could ever be strong enough to—on consequentialist grounds—mean someone who doesn’t want kids should have kids regardless.
Thirdly, I find the idea of adopting pulls at my heartstrings, but have lost track of how many times I’ve heard the argument that I should have my own kids to pass on my genes. Naturally sperm bank donations are always an option if I am rationally committed to the latter. But the question still remains which is, as an EA and a psychology professor, how do you think about adoption vs having your own kids?
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.
do you think there is a good pronatalist argument to be made that an EA that doesn’t feel like they want kids should still regardless have kids?
I don’t think anyone who doesn’t want to have kids should have them. It’s a huge amount of work, and if you’re not excited about it it seems likely to make you miserable.
if you’re not excited about it it seems likely to make you miserable.
I’m not sure the data really supports this view. People are pretty good at adapting, and a lot of men in particular seem to become far more excited about their kids after they are born than they expected to be ahead of time.
As an extreme example, the recent Turnaround study investigated the impact of abortion denial on expectant mothers. While there were other negative consequences, involuntary motherhood does not appear to have made women miserable:
However, women did not suffer lasting mental health consequences, prompting questions about the effects of denial on women’s emotions. … Subsequent positive life events and bonding with the child also led to positive retrospective evaluations of the denial.
If even people in such an extreme situation can adjust then I suspect people who are merely ‘not excited’ can also.
Another thing is just I wonder: if a strong enough pronatalist argument was presented to me maybe that in itself would make me excited enough to have kids. I do adapt enthusiastically to EA arguments telling me to donate here vs there, to change my career etc. Though naturally, sometimes I adapt with resistance and begrudgingly. I wonder if there is some pronatalist argument I haven’t heard that will firmly slot me into the former group where I adapt enthusiastically.
But as you point out, maybe I don’t even need to stress too much about merely being ‘not excited’ if a good enough pronatalist argument convinces me I should have kids. This is something I’d love to get feedback on from EAs who have kids (and I can think of zero EAs in my social circle that have kids). Jeff Kaufman, do you have kids of your own that makes you more confident in your statement?
(meta-note: I don’t know if it is possible to tag someone in a comment to notify them they have been mentioned)
Cornelis—from my evolutionary psychologist perspective, a big difference between becoming a parent and becoming a super-generous donor, is that we’ve evolved for 70 million years to be good mammalian mothers, and for about 3 million years to be good, high-investing, hominid fathers. So there are many evolved adaptations for parenting just waiting to get switched on after kids arrive, that make parenting feel generally rewarding. (Likewise, kids evolved to be cute, charming, and interesting to their parents, so it’s a coevolutionary interaction.)
The basic problem is that with contraception, we’re not in a situation where kids just start popping out after we start falling in love and having sex, so many young people don’t have the experience of feeling their parental adaptations get activated automatically by kids arriving. So there were quite limited selection pressures to ‘want kids’ before kids arrived.
Hi Prof. Miller,
Do you think I should spend effort and research and care about the particulars of having kids ahead of time even though I largely perceive myself as possibly/probably never wanting to have kids? It certainly seems reasonable to strongly expect I might eventually fully change my mind about having kids just because having kids is—well—genetically mandated and such. Preparing and planning now seems like a wise hedge against my lack of desire to have kids right now?
I am a 30 year old male now and am still sorta mostly leaning towards not having kids. Is that normally a sign that this is how I should expect my psychology to be throughout my thirties and forties? And I should just not sweat it and continue to focus on studying AI Alignment?
Secondly, do you think there is a good pronatalist argument to be made that an EA that doesn’t feel like they want kids should still regardless have kids? I’ve heard the “in expectation if EAs all have kids we’ll get more geniuses—low prob. in each case, but such high potential impact that we ought to have kids” argument. I take this line of thinking seriously, but I still find it hard to think that this argument could ever be strong enough to—on consequentialist grounds—mean someone who doesn’t want kids should have kids regardless.
Thirdly, I find the idea of adopting pulls at my heartstrings, but have lost track of how many times I’ve heard the argument that I should have my own kids to pass on my genes. Naturally sperm bank donations are always an option if I am rationally committed to the latter. But the question still remains which is, as an EA and a psychology professor, how do you think about adoption vs having your own kids?
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.
I don’t think anyone who doesn’t want to have kids should have them. It’s a huge amount of work, and if you’re not excited about it it seems likely to make you miserable.
I’m not sure the data really supports this view. People are pretty good at adapting, and a lot of men in particular seem to become far more excited about their kids after they are born than they expected to be ahead of time.
As an extreme example, the recent Turnaround study investigated the impact of abortion denial on expectant mothers. While there were other negative consequences, involuntary motherhood does not appear to have made women miserable:
If even people in such an extreme situation can adjust then I suspect people who are merely ‘not excited’ can also.
Another thing is just I wonder: if a strong enough pronatalist argument was presented to me maybe that in itself would make me excited enough to have kids. I do adapt enthusiastically to EA arguments telling me to donate here vs there, to change my career etc. Though naturally, sometimes I adapt with resistance and begrudgingly. I wonder if there is some pronatalist argument I haven’t heard that will firmly slot me into the former group where I adapt enthusiastically.
But as you point out, maybe I don’t even need to stress too much about merely being ‘not excited’ if a good enough pronatalist argument convinces me I should have kids. This is something I’d love to get feedback on from EAs who have kids (and I can think of zero EAs in my social circle that have kids). Jeff Kaufman, do you have kids of your own that makes you more confident in your statement?
(meta-note: I don’t know if it is possible to tag someone in a comment to notify them they have been mentioned)
Three kids: 8y, 6y, and 15m
Happened to see it ;)
Cornelis—from my evolutionary psychologist perspective, a big difference between becoming a parent and becoming a super-generous donor, is that we’ve evolved for 70 million years to be good mammalian mothers, and for about 3 million years to be good, high-investing, hominid fathers. So there are many evolved adaptations for parenting just waiting to get switched on after kids arrive, that make parenting feel generally rewarding. (Likewise, kids evolved to be cute, charming, and interesting to their parents, so it’s a coevolutionary interaction.)
The basic problem is that with contraception, we’re not in a situation where kids just start popping out after we start falling in love and having sex, so many young people don’t have the experience of feeling their parental adaptations get activated automatically by kids arriving. So there were quite limited selection pressures to ‘want kids’ before kids arrived.