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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

> Really bad look for YC, being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have. A blessing and privilege only afforded to women, and they tossed this founder out for no reason.

This is some sexist godddam bullshit.

Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.

Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child or saving every human on the planet two hours of labor a week?

Ideally, no one should have to chose, you ought to be able to do both of those things at once, and not having to pick.

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> Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.

Without that occurring, society and civilization would soon cease to exist. It's a little difficult to overstate its importance. I would even go so far as to say that the most important thing a man can do is become a father.

If people were trying to disabuse the rest of us of the notion that a woman can't succeed in a career and also be a mother, the actions of the conference organizer undermined that.

> Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child

Raising 2.1 children, but I'll forgive getting the number wrong. Pretending that this doesn't have a more meaningful impact than having a c-level job title in some company trying to launch a phone app that will sell us pet food more efficiently is asinine.

It is important that people in general become parents in some number so that the human race can continue to exist, yes. No one is denying that.

Not everyone needs to be a parent. We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because of a reduction in childbirth. There are more pressing existential threats related to having more people than there are pressing existential threats related to having fewer, even if you don't believe in climate change, etc. We have wars over land and resources today, including powers with the ability to end modern human civilization in a nuclear holocaust.

None of which is to say people should stop having children if they want to, but the idea that the greatest contribution people can make to the world is having kids is absurd. You're being reductive in relegating it to making a phone app to sell pet food, so I'll do the same in the other direction - If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but remain childless, have they contributed less to humanity than an individual that does raise 2.1 children?

> Not everyone needs to be a parent.

While true in the strict sense, this is false in a more general sense. Yes, everyone does need to become a parent. You're not the 1-in-100 exception that gets to duck this responsibility, and you're definitely not all that exception, people reading the comment.

The more of you who skip out on this, the greater the burden on those that don't. When you don't have you're 2.1 children, someone else has to have those children on top of the 2.1 they need for themselves.

> We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because

We are actually in danger of extinction, the math is simple, and only a bizarre form of willful blindness prevents you from seeing it. You can check anywhere you like, find some source that you trust. It will tell you that we have sub-replacement fertility. In the United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere. In east Asia. The latest numbers are highly suggestive that India just recently (within the last 3 years or so) has sunk below the replacement level. There are few countries not suffering this trend, there are none untouched by it. It generally takes about 20 minutes to walk through all the various fallacies, at the end of which the denier then says "but when things shrink down a little fertility can go back up, and things will be fine!"

Except fertility doesn't go back up. No little girl who grows up in a world where all her role models have few or no children will wake up one morning and say to herself "I want 2.1 children when I'm a grownup!" but that's what would have to happen for all little girls. Just for the population to stabilize. If only some of them say that, then we're still on the road to extinction, because the average has to be 2.1. The same ideas that caused people to remain childless will still be floating around. There will still be people telling those little girls...

> Not everyone needs to be a parent.

One of them might even be you, depending on how long you live.

> If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but

Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.

This seems to all be presupposed on the idea that the population growing is a positive thing is a universally accepted truth. I don't think that is a de facto true statement. I wrote a lot arguing this point, got towards the end of your comment, and realized that most of it is nothing that will change your mind, so instead I'll focus on why I deleted it all:

> Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.

I originally wrote about how cancer impacts more than just geriatric people, and how even from your perspective, around 1800 children die from cancer every year - people who will, in theory, even at sub-replacement levels, produce more kids than an individual making their 2.1 children.

But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life. If life isn't good, what is the point of having kids? Back when I still wanted children, I had decided not to have them because of concerns about climate change. I believe that it is at the very least human-accelerated, and most likely primarily caused by us as well, but even if not, we have clear trends and data showing that there is a very real risk that huge portions of humanity will have their lives significantly disrupted by it in my lifetime, much less that of my children. I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.

But if the prevailing opinion of people in the world was "Let's not cure cancer because it's just saving geriatric people who won't have more kids anyway," then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in. I think the existence of humanity is an amoral thing - there's not fundamentally any specific reason we need to exist beyond us wanting to, and if as a collective whole we decide that existence has not been a thing wonderful enough to bring new people into it and we no longer desire to exist, then, well, that's fine.

If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.

to me the main point of the parent comment was not that population growth is good, but that the current trend points to a sharp population decline coming in a century or two, and once we have a sharp decline it will be very hard to stop that decline and get to zero growth at replacement rate which is really what the goal in the end must be.

If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.

i agree, but at this point we are really very far away from that.

> This seems to all be presupposed on the idea that the population growing is a positive thing is a universally accepted truth

I used the number 2.1. It does not result in population growth. It gives you a nearly perfect population stability. It neither grows, nor shrinks. And if that's not good enough for you, if it happened right this moment, the population once stabilized would be a bit smaller than it is now.

> But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life.

"Purpose of life" sounds religious, or ignorant. Instead, let's talk about whether you like humans and think humans are positive. If you do, you would dislike any trend or event which would make them extinct. If the extinction is proceeding, and you're whining about how it's unfair that women are treated like babymaking machines (which all humans are, male and female), then it seems that quite without knowing it, you think humans are a negative thing. Not so negative maybe that they require being wiped out immediately, but negative enough you will do nothing to halt the slow-motion extinction that is coming.

While there are the occasional individuals I dislike, I like humans in total, and I would be sad if I were forced to believe that they will be extinct 1000 years from now. But there is a growing sentiment that they are bad, and maybe this dull, unintelligent rock would be better off if humans were gone. A sort of death cult.

> I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.

My ancestors survived famines and disasters that would shock all of us into disbelief. Horrors and terrors. Predated upon, eaten alive. Suffering with diseases unknown to modern man. Much of the time without even understanding what was going on, it's no surprise they imagined and invented gods doing that to them, evil gods. For them to have gone through all that, and to give up on what we've all been doing because my children might have to figure out some engineering... naive or blasphemous, I don't know what to call it. My children could solve any problem, will solve them.

> then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in.

So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.

> If we want humanity to continue,

You've already made your choice. I see no reason to consult you further.

Yeah. The guy who explicitly stated people who are too old to have children aren't worth saving is the person who values human life more than me.

I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by someone who has distilled humanity down to just reproducing. We're not single-celled organisms, man. We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.

> So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.

Making a value judgment about theoretical children based on a few online interactions is such a deeply weird thing to do. This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.

> Yeah. The guy who explicitly stated people who are too old to have children aren't worth saving is the person who values human life more than me.

It's difficult to explain counter-intuitiveness to the unclever. But yes. Overvaluing the geriatric to the exclusion of children and pro-procreation is equivalent to not valuing human life. It seems like some people should be able to get that, given how the old are so close to death, that it's about valuing death.

> I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by

Many cult members report similar sentiments if/when they are deprogrammed. From the inside, they're pretty sure they're the normal ones, and everyone else is weird.

> We're not single-celled organisms,

So some claim. They're sure, somehow, that they've transcended their biology. That, descending from an unending lineage nearly 4 billion years long, that they are the specific individual that all of that happened for, and things need not continue beyond them.

But you're just an animal.

> We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.

You absolutely cannot. When you do this, you die having achieved little and having left no one to replace you on planet Earth to continue whatever work you thought so important that you skipped making children. All your works will, within two centuries or less, be for naught.

> This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.

That tends to happen when you chance upon someone not promoting the status quo.

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