Why it is important not to have children
stallman.org
stallman.org
Great, take smart people out of the gene pool. I don't think he's thought through his cunning plan. As he says, he doesn't believe he'll cause everyone to not have children. But the only people who even know who he is are the relatively smarter part of the population, and therefore any of those who act on his advice have just diminished humanity's potential.
My boy is the best thing that ever happened to me. I believe the world is a better place for him being in it.
Rather than "not have children" be the solution (of smart people, no less!), wouldn't it be better to figure out how to make the lives of all these children more meaningful, and by extension the life and effect of humanity?
For ostensibly different reasons now we've got do-gooders doing exactly the same damned thing to us.
First, there's regression to the mean, which says the children of an above-average smart person won't be likely to be measurably above average (true also for a person less intelligent than average).
Second, as the planet becomes more crowded, the intelligence, wittiness or saintliness of the offspring stops mattering when they're all starving.
In this case the assumption seems to be that, measured by the intelligence of the first person as an outlier, IQ's going to be average on the second measurement - their kid. However, IQ doesn't necessarily trend that way in family lines over time. If IQ really does have a heritable genetic component, then, while people might trend up and down, over time the aggregate is going to be persistently higher for some than for others.
Actually, yes, that's how it works. An individual person who is smarter (or dumber) than his lineage isn't likely to have children equally or even significantly smarter (or dumber).
Think of a person as being the offshoot, not of his parents, but of 1000 predecessors including his parents. Now think of that person's children also being the offshoot of 998 predecessors plus his 2 parents. Work out the probability of inheriting any significant percentage of the high intelligence of the 2 compared to the 998.
This example is meant more to convey the idea than be exactly representative.
> while people might trend up and down, over time the aggregate is going to be persistently higher for some than for others.
Yes, but as explained above and accepting that premise, statistics argues against the idea that a smart person will have children significantly smarter than the population as a whole.
Also, bottom line and in the long term, intelligent starving children are still starving children.
Maybe the 998 were above average too. Regression to the mean would be the way to bet if you didn't have any other data - but how heritable is intelligence?
> Yes, but as explained above and accepting that premise, statistics argues against the idea that a smart person will have children significantly smarter than the population as a whole.
Wouldn't that only be the case if you take the population as a whole as their lineage?
> Also, bottom line and in the long term, intelligent starving children are still starving children.
I'd expect smart people to provide significant better for their children down the line than will stupid people. If you're looking at the future of humanity a small, dominant group that better fulfils your preferences is going to be a lot more worthwhile for some people.
Yes, all valid points, but to some extent set aside by the issue that, on an overcrowded planet, ten additional intelligent people isn't necessarily better than one additional intelligent person.
> Wouldn't that only be the case if you take the population as a whole as their lineage?
No, any grouping larger than two begins to show the effect of regression to the mean. My choice of 1000 was rather arbitrary, just to show the idea, and knowing the "right" number would require us to understand more about IQ heritability factors than we actually know.
I don't think assessing the entire population of a species is required for this idea to work as it does in nature. Indeed, on the contrary -- in this example, all one need do is group people by the genetic traits that lead to a particular IQ, and the heritability patterns of those genes.
> I'd expect smart people to provide significant better for their children down the line than will stupid people.
I might be tempted to agree on emotional grounds, but there's some circumstantial evidence that this isn't so, if we accept mental illness statistics and suicide rates at face value. Also, arguing that smart people should be allowed to have more children (an argument you aren't making) has some obvious logical difficulties, not least of which is that everyone thinks their children are above average.
> If you're looking at the future of humanity a small, dominant group that better fulfils your preferences is going to be a lot more worthwhile for some people.
Not very clear what you're saying here, but a wide genotype has been shown to produce better (healthier, fitter) results than a narrow one.
The gene pool quality line of thinking doesn't lead to anything good. Our gene pool is pretty resilient to these things. If our smarts genes were easily ousted by ones procreating like rabbits, we would have gotten rid of intelligence a long time ago.
Actually it could be the inverse. For one, RMS is quite kooky.
Second, who said that those that follow his advice would be the "smarter part of the population"?
So your life was meaningless without having a child? And, following the same logic, your son's life is nothing too, unless he gets a child too?
Or do you mean "it's the best thing that happened to you", but other things were quite nice too?
I have a question thought -- not to you, in general.
If their kids are "the best that happened to them" (as most say), why do we have so many cases of neglected or abused children, tons of estranged parents and children ("haven't spoke to my folks for years"), crazy fights, depression, etc. I guess it's human nature, but also it seems like "the best thing that happened to me" is mainly about the kid being a baby and such (the novelty factor?), and not so much afterwards.
You take notice of the examples toward either end of the spectrum, people like me who say it's the best ever (and he's 15, not a baby), and slobs who beat and neglect their kids. The majority are in the middle, silent, and they love their kids, even if they never say so.
People suck. At least, they can. For the abusers, they probably can't understand that their kids could be the best thing that ever happened to them. And even for the people who aren't outright assholes, it's stressful to be married or cohabitating, especially with kids. Some people don't hold up well. We're not all the same.
I see no reason not to have kids, not by policy anyway. Some people don't want them or aren't suited to it. To borrow the bumper sticker: "Don't like kids? Don't have one." But having kids is undeniably a natural state. Life is hard, and the universe is cold, so why not claim this little bit of birthright?
And yes, I think over-population is not going to be a problem. As education rises, birthrates fall. If anything, population loss will be the longer term problem, as Japan is just beginning to see the first waves. Their problem is not just longevity, it's that fewer young people are marrying and having fewer children. In the end we'll learn to deal with that too, but it will be quite a disruption after centuries of societies that implicitly assume growth and families.
That's a common misconception about genetics. In fact, the children of a very smart person tend to regress toward the mean (just as the children of a very dumb person). So a smart person choosing not to have children doesn't typically produce the outcome you think it does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean
Also, your view overlooks the power of ideas, and the degree to which a person can choose to focus on ideas instead of children.
Here's an example -- do you know the names of Einstein's children? I do -- they're special relativity, general relativity, and the photoelectric effect. They look great together in family pictures.
AFTER EDIT:
The one reply to my comment here asks a pertinent question, which I hope I have given an adequate answer in a new reply. Meanwhile I will revise this comment to note that, as a subsequent comment has pointed out, there are already many countries in the world with negative population growth and a likely trend that the entire world will reach a peak population and then begin to have declining population while my children are middle-aged (and when I may, perhaps, still be alive). So, yes, RMS is certainly welcome not to have children if he is concerned about what bearing children might do to his family life or to the world as a whole, but I hope HN participants will be open to the possibility that some people choose to have children with their eyes open, knowing the trade-offs, and have a channel through having children to help you, me, and the whole world.
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesot...
I have been aware that while adoptive parents can certainly do much to remove children from the deprivation of orphanages and the like, they sometimes can do less than they hope to influence the development of children not closely related to persons in their own family lineage. I commend anyone who chooses to adopt children, and I commend anyone who declines to have children, but I also commend anyone who has children and takes great care in bringing them up. New human beings with fresh ideas and well developed ability and inclination to contribute to human society are still a net benefit to humankind, whoever takes responsibility for bringing them up.
My oldest son, the hacker, is already a self-sufficient adult, and I think he thinks deeply and seriously about how to be a benefit to the world as a whole. (The "world as a whole" means more to him than to many Americans because he has lived overseas when he was young.) My younger children appear to be on a similar track, and I had so many children precisely because I observed how my multicultural, "interracial" family seemed to be influencing each child from birth to the age when the next child was born.
This argument would be equally (in)valid for any tragedy of the commons type situation, like CO2 emissions or fisheries depletion etc.
Also, more people isn't always a bad thing, even in an overpopulated world. If a person is a net gain for society, then it would be a loss not to have him born. If you're healthy and are willing and capable of raising a child in nurturing family, please do so. A well raised person can offset his impact on the world and contribute even more than they take.
To make sure you are offsetting your complete global impact, you have to get rid of the unknowns. Hence, no having children is the only option.
If you start from belief that you and your children won't be able to influence policy and government, and people also can't make a difference by acting locally and practicing what they preach... you paint a pretty bleak picture.
I'm not saying it's worthless to practice what you preach - rather, we can't rely on individual convictions as the solution to our collective problems. It certainly helps, but the majority of the solution will have to come from elsewhere.
Sorry, that's irrational. The only choices are individual ones -- governments can't really control what individuals do. Look at China's failed one-child policy.
Overpopulation results from billions of people rationalizing that their individual choice can't possibly matter.
> we can't rely on individual convictions as the solution to our collective problems.
What? Did I hear you right? Don't you understand that democracy is designed to honor and respect individual choices? The collective problem of overpopulation results from many individual choices to have children.
> the majority of the solution will have to come from elsewhere.
Healthy, non-dictatorial governments wait for the people to tell them what values to reflect and enforce. By contrast, dictators rely on the kind of person who says, "Let the experts solve these problems, individuals don't count."
On the positive side, education works wonders. Many studies show that educated women have smaller families.
The very notion of democracy is that there is NO layperson.
The citizen very much has responsibility for his state's actions, and policymakers and implementers are only supposed to reflect the general will of the population.
On the contrary! Deferring to governments a responsibility for personal choices is always a dangerous mistake. Governments are supposed to reflect the values of the people. But if the people automatically defer to the government responsibility for their values, the entire system collapses.
To me, the remedy is education, and it's been demonstrated over and over again that, as a woman's educational prospects improve, so does her wish to limit her family size.
Overpopulation doesn't result from masses of people letting governments choose their values. Overpopulation results from billions of individual choices, based on rationalizations like yours. To wit:
> Also, more people isn't always a bad thing, even in an overpopulated world.
This is like arguing that, during a forest fire, more fuel isn't always a bad thing. But in point of fact, yes, it is always a bad thing.
> A well raised person can offset his impact on the world and contribute even more than they take.
Yes and every parent on this planet blithely rationalizes that his/her children will be that sort of child. And they're wrong.
It seems we all live in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.
The basic logic is that, when there are too many people, who they are as individuals stops mattering. Even if we could control the outcomes and only have extraordinary, saintly children, do we really want a world filled with starving saints?
Large parts of humanity have always had a problem getting water or food and it had nothing to do with global warming, rather politics, governance, and culture. These will always be a bigger problem.
Yes. But not relevant. One has to remove such constants in order to see what's new.
So, while "Large parts of humanity have always had a problem getting water or food and it had nothing to do with global warming", now it also HAS to do with global warming.
Also note that regardless of what you think in general about the impact the growing number of humans has on the economic growth, it's hardly debatable that if Richard Stallman specifically had decided to have children, his children would have very likely contributed much more than an average human, just like RMS himself has.
So in reality his decision was exactly counterproductive providing parts of humanity with water or food.
To all the parents out there (I am not one): Thank you. You don't know me, but your decision to have a child is as good as if you donated maybe $1e-4 to my 401(k). And everyone else's. If you live in the US, more. If you are a very smart and hard working person, even more. By caring for your own child, you're also feeding some hungry child in Africa 25 years from now. Richard Stallman should be grateful to you.
as a father, i may go out of my way to disagree with him to justify my own past decisions. as an unattractive social reject, i may go out of my way to agree with him.
we are naturally going to have very intense feelings and be very egotistical one way or another about the subject of spreading our own DNA.
That is the UN's low estimate.
The median UN human population projection estimates that we peak at 10 billion people around 2100.
Chart at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe (I wont pretend wikipedia is a source, the chart could be completely wroing, I have not crunched the numbers at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm myself)
In my personal experience, often when discussing war people will resort to the "there are too many people" excuse if I first convince then that other justifications to kill are invalid.
There is an organization that argues the other side of Stallman's reasoning: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/category/categories/pop101
Or people thinking like you, for that matter.
What exactly makes you think you are worth more than a "hick, vato or homeboy"?
A high IQ? I'd take kindness, altruism and consideration for others any day.
Not to mention your comment borders on full blown racism, stopping just short of the "n" word.
I want...
Classism, lack of education perhaps, you could be much more accurate and not undermine your argument by throwing racism around.
Societal decline is an effect, he was talking of a cause... that the educated tend to have fewer children, which is not in dispute.
XKCD creates a strawman and defeats it with "I don't like you!" Not his best work obviously.
http://www.vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#schopenquote
though RMS states his goal is simply less humans, not no humans.
We always slightly overshoot (carried by technology), and stabilize by those things you are mentioning (hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...). We just slightly overshoot not because of restrain, but because it is physically impossible to overshoot too much, since mortality increases very strongly (exponentially?) once we are above carrying capacity.
A civilized society would stabilize its numbers slightly below carrying capacity, so that suffering can be minimized and quality of living vastly improved. The more gap we allow between carrying capacity and actual population, the better our quality of life would be. But I guess we are not there yet.
In order to make sense of the importance of anything in time, I remove the constants and just check for the differences.
So, if we "always slightly overshoot" and stabilized by "hunger, war, diseases, infant mortailty, ...", the fearful thing is that in this particular era we also have:
(1) An astounding number of people in "third world" countries.
(2) Mass ecological harm.
(3) Global warming and continuous extreme weather conditions, like successive breaking of the records for the hottest summer temps recorder (whether one believes it's connected to (2) or not, which I do).
(4) Weapons that can wipe out the population or even the rock we are standing in several times over (from bio to nuclear).
I don't buy the false choice of GNU/no children or children/no GNU. Why does it have to be either/or?
at least for the salary earning classes.
people's range of behavior is narrowed by the hierarchy of needs. having a child amplifies this effect.
if you want to do something revolutionary that potentially threatens the status quo, it is better to be either independently wealthy or have much fewer economic needs and pressures.
Plenty of abusive, criminal, ..., families. Matter of fact, every negative historical figure was also born into a family.
Families are vital. That everybody from Genghis Kahn to Jonas Salk was born into one ought to be the tip-off.
Darwin would get a chuckle out of this.
Then, they were replaced by the Selfish Gene, and Science looked like a winner for a while.
Then came Stallman, with His Bright Idea: the Forrest Gump Gene That Watches Other Selfish Genes Thrive, And Then Dies.
In the end, Selfish Parrots will eventually inherit the world, and Science will triumph again.