I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
And dont get me wrong - we arent climate change deniers, just... pick your battles
Why waste your life worrying about something you have tiny impact on?
But until I or you manage to meet at least one person with such approach, then I do recommend to do not take it seriously
Our kids are worried about it, more so than our generation, that's for sure.
1. Teach: humanity has done X to the environment
2. Teach: if we don’t do something Y will happen
3. Conclude: I was not alive to do X
4. Ergo: the adults in my life did X
5. Ergo: the adults in my life will continue to do X which will cause Y because I can’t affect meaningful change
I don’t automatically assume they start at step 5 at school. I’ve seen his math homework. Is that a normal way of thinking though?
To automatically assume that with my son would teach him (likely, inadvertently) that what he learns at school may not be right (which isn’t true, for the most part). Rather I want to teach him that he takes ownership of the words that come out of his mouth. That his opinions are his own and he has to defend them, and further learn what is an opinion and what is a fact.
Wait, you don't teach him that?
This is a 100% attitude and filtering issue.
I don't want to teach my son that him misunderstanding something is someone else's fault. Obviously, this wasn't taught in class. He was taught lots of things and was a conclusion he came to on his own. Like nobody ever told me that a McDonald's hamburger will cost around $50 when I retire, I simply did some math based on the average inflation. Will it actually? no idea. But I know that I should probably have that much more in my retirement account.
No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude. Nine year olds are not famous for their critical thinking and deep research skills.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35975422
> No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude.
Do you know us IRL or something?
Yes, I may be seeing a bubble - but that is across three different countries, and clearly reflected in car-ownership statistics (down dramatically in younger generations) and in voting preferences.
there's an entire Voluntary Human Extinction Movement...
In 20 years not, but it's reasonable to believe for anyone outside America and Central Europe that wide swaths of the planet - particularly the entirety of Africa and lots of Asia - will be unable to support human life.
Hell, we're already seeing issues with water supply even in Central Europe, with France restricting water consumptions because of drought [2], and Germany's water reserves are dwindling as well. India is suffering from a massive heat wave [1], and last year's devastation in Australia should still be in living memory.
Anyone who is not worried about the future of the planet is either ridiculously ignorant to reality or completely incompetent. And the worst thing is, politicians in power play down climate change, act like future technology (anything from nuclear fusion to desalination plants) will save us, or deny it entirely - and wide swaths to outright majorities of people believe that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/17/weather-...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/10/southern-france-re...
Worrying here was reflected by drastic actions. Not worrying didnt mean not worrying at all.
Do you happen to remember the global wildfires/rivers drying up/massive heat waves in 2020? About a few billion people worldwide / 100m Americans sure do. A larger and larger portion of them are starting to understanding what the cause to that is and are acting accordingly.
Every year, we keep hearing how even the most aggressive estimates for climate change were underestimated. That's terrifying and existential to a lot of people including me.
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
That argument seems rather doubtful to me.
This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.
I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
> I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
So the climate "birth strike" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973163) strategy would necessarily have to have two parts to be successful: 1) refuse to have kids, 2) indoctrinate many of the ones that remain to reject their parent's outlook and adopt the strikers' outlook (e.g. through control of the school curriculum). I would expect the second point to result in scenes like this, where a kid comes home from school mad at his a parents for having him in a world with climate change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973070.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/birthst...
If your goal is to pass your life outlook to more people in the next generation, I believe you're probably likely to be successful without kids than with them. Without kids you have much more time to reach more people.
many such cases
(the reverse happens a lot too)
1. There is no scientific reason to believe the world is doomed. Go read some serious climatology papers and see for yourself. They're unreliable and exaggerated but even so, no doom.
2. State pensions and benefits might actually be doomed though given demographics. If the state can't take care of you in old age, you'd better hope you have kids who will.
Jokes aside, I have heard both points made. Yours and the one from the parent poster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Yes, the current temperature shift now is greater but it has been ongoing for a much shorter period of time.
That's worse, not better! https://xkcd.com/1732/
Temperature has varied drastically throughout time. There were Vikings growing barley in Greenland, something completely impossible today. The reason you believe otherwise is because climate doomers lie a lot.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
But why should my standards be just better than most times in human history? That seems a low bar to me, most times in human history were miserable for the majority of people compared to the living standards I've become accustomed to.
To be clear, I don't feel there is any moral duty to continue my particular genes and the world population will continue to increase for the foreseeable regardless. If I were to have children I personally would feel guilty if they had it significantly harder than I have and I think the likelihood is that will be the case - it's really as simple as that.
If you could be born in America in 1925 and live until 2015, would you? Or would you decline because the standard of living dropped right away with a Great Depression followed by a world war?
I agree with you that if I knew, with certainty, that my children’s lives would be filled with nothing but suffering, I would make the same choice. But a fear of a theoretical drop in a standard of living, and which may not even impact an American over the next 100 years all that much, does not seem to me like it should reach that threshold, and I suspect it is starting to for others because of the media playing into their anxieties. There are people living that lived through the holocaust and are still happy to have lived and, over their lifetime, have had fulfilled and happy lives. I suspect your children could likewise carve out a happy life, even if their standard of living is somewhat reduced.
I agree you have no moral duty to have kids, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. But if you want them, but are not having them because you find that to be cruel to your unborn kids, I question whether that is really a rational choice.
I'd agree there's nuance to this. For your cherry picked scenario, no, that wouldn't affect my decision. I can accept a single person having a reduction in living standards. However, when most of Western society (I'm British, not American) is struggling to attain housing at a rate similar to the generation before, when the middle classes as a whole aren't able to become as financially secure as the generation before then it is enough to give me pause.
So ignoring any climate worries I already think things will be much harder. When you add on that it's estimated that billions will be without sufficient water in a few decades it's not hard to imagine that there will be significant problems of which I have very little confidence that we will be able to handle well as a species.
Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. But as I say, this isn't the only factor we've taken into account, it's more a tertiary concern.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/land-of-lessees_swiss-continue-...
Weirdly, the dominance of renting in Switzerland doesn't stop the Swiss having children. So this is really very much a media induced anxiety disorder of some sort. It's not rational to decide whether or not to have children based on whether you can get a mortgage.
https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Switzerland/Home-...
As you can see, Swiss single family house prices were stable since 2016. It's a different lifestyle, there's a lot of apartment living with shared gardens for example, but it can be done.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.