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Comment by oooooooooooow | Hacker News Reader

I'd much rather change my extremely wasteful (can't overstate how much, from someone that makes an effort to minimize it) lifestyle, and much rather use the force of law so that everyone has to, before advocating or forcing such an asinine policy.

Even if strange when it comes to animals, humanity progresses following rules similar to classic evolution, aka by randomly mixing stuff until something works. We've gotten (only) pretty good at selecting and amplifying what works extremely well, but we still need a steady stream of randomly arranged characteristics to enter the pool. Imagine if the next Newton isn't born (or is born 200 years later) because a couple decided to not have children to "save the planet". Perhaps this figure would've been a key piece in a breakthrough discovery about energy, climate, terraforming, public policy....

I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists.

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> I seriously fail to understand anti-natalists

I think it very much depends on how one experiences life. The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other.

Your point about "the next Newton" is unrelated, and IMO misses the mark. It's not coincidence that Newton, Hooke, Boyle etc appeared in the same place at the same time, and it's not because there'd been a crippling shortage of randomly arranged characteristics before that. The right characteristics aren't enough, you also need the leisure to develop them (which implies material surplus) and a society that makes sufficient use of scientific discoveries to value and propagate them. Nobody would have heard of Isaac Newton if he'd been born a subsistence farmer. I'm sure lots of potential Isaac Newtons were, and in many ways that's a tragedy.

> The two ends of that scale are largely incomprehensible to each other.

Absolutely. Just to set the record straight, I am not anti-birth and I think I agree with GP more than I disagree. We must do everything we can to reduce the carbon footprint per person. I am just logically following what my parent post said.

I didn't even know the word anti-natalist. I want all children who are born to be healthy and reach their full potential as productive adults. One child is a blessing. Two is also fine (I have a sibling).

At least in a developed country, if someone has eight or more (not born at the same time) children, they are terrorizing the environment in my eyes. I don't see how you can justify that with access to decent healthcare and the infant mortality rate is under ten.

I mean if you live in a place where infant mortality rate is over a hundred (a quick web search shows that IMR in Afghanistan is over 110 which means a hundred and ten die before the age of one of every thousand infants born), I can't imagine the pain and suffering the parents must be going through.

We clearly can do better. The open question is how.

Your POV comes across much more sensible in this answer, to me. It's become clear how families in societies tend to make fewer children as the civilization progresses. People in some underdeveloped countries try to make a large number of children because the child mortality is so high, and there's a dire need for manual labor. So one way to do better is work towards improving the situation in underdeveloped countries. In developed countries very rarely you see mothers of 8, and a target fertility rate of "below 1", as you stated, is nonsense.

You'll have to pardon my bluntness, I've seen many self proclaimed environmentalists straight up advocate and encourage women to never have children for the sake of the planet.

> I've seen many self proclaimed environmentalists straight up advocate and encourage women to never have children for the sake of the planet

OK, I think you're talking here about VHEMT [1] and the like, which is only very tangentially related to traditional [2] antinatalism. The latter is more a reduction-of-suffering philosophy, in much the same way that vegans/vegetarians/etc believe that it's better for an animal never to live at all than to endure the conditions of modern meat farming.

Obviously neither movement stands much chance of success since neither stands any chance of convincing an entire population. If they have any effect at all, the former will tend to eliminate genes associated with environmentalism, while the latter will tend to eliminate genes associated with unhappiness (which doesn't sound so bad).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...

[2] It's not new, goes back to Ancient Greece at least

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