I agree that blanket endorsements of anti-natalism (whether for climate or other reasons) in EA social media spaces are concerning, and I appreciate you taking the time to write down why you think they are misguided.
FWIW, my reaction to this post is: you present a valid argument (i.e. if I believed all your factual premises, then I’d think your conclusion follows), but this post by itself doesn’t convince me that the following factual premise is true:
The magnitude of [your kids’] impact on the climate is likely to be much, much smaller than any of the three other factors I have raised.
At first glance, this seems highly non-obvious to me. I’d probably at least want to see a back-of-the-envelope calculation before believing this is right.
(And I’m not sure it is: I agree that your kids’ impact on the climate would be more causally distant than their impact on your own well-being, your career, etc. However, conversely, there is a massive scale difference: impacts on climate affect the well-being of many people in many generations, not just your own. Notably, this is also true for impacts on your career, in particular if you try to improve the long-term future. So my first-pass guess is that the expected impact will be dominated by the non-obvious comparison of these two “distant” effects.)
At $50 per ton cost to sequester the average American would need to generate $1000 per year of positive impact to offset their co2 use. The idea that the numbers are even close to comparable means priors are way way off. The signaling commons have been polluted on this front from people impact larping their short showers, lack of water at restaurants and other absurdities.
I agree that blanket endorsements of anti-natalism (whether for climate or other reasons) in EA social media spaces are concerning, and I appreciate you taking the time to write down why you think they are misguided.
FWIW, my reaction to this post is: you present a valid argument (i.e. if I believed all your factual premises, then I’d think your conclusion follows), but this post by itself doesn’t convince me that the following factual premise is true:
At first glance, this seems highly non-obvious to me. I’d probably at least want to see a back-of-the-envelope calculation before believing this is right.
(And I’m not sure it is: I agree that your kids’ impact on the climate would be more causally distant than their impact on your own well-being, your career, etc. However, conversely, there is a massive scale difference: impacts on climate affect the well-being of many people in many generations, not just your own. Notably, this is also true for impacts on your career, in particular if you try to improve the long-term future. So my first-pass guess is that the expected impact will be dominated by the non-obvious comparison of these two “distant” effects.)
At $50 per ton cost to sequester the average American would need to generate $1000 per year of positive impact to offset their co2 use. The idea that the numbers are even close to comparable means priors are way way off. The signaling commons have been polluted on this front from people impact larping their short showers, lack of water at restaurants and other absurdities.