The world is in a spiraling fertility crisis which everyone has notice over the last year-ish. Sarah Haider proposes a GI Bill for young moms. Scott Alexander says a govt payment of $200,000 per child should work. Everyone wants to go back to thick-community-style living.
IMHO you get less than 50% (though much more than 33%) of the utility of 3 children (what I have) with just 1 (what my parents had), especially in the present day (when most kids have far less nearby extended family and neighbor children) and assuming you can have kids close enough together in age. With 3 kids, each of them nearly always has someone to play with (even if one of their two siblings is busy), as well as a non-authority-figure to talk with. Two of them have at least one easily relatable role model to look up to, and two of them have at least one junior looking up to them. Many of the costs of raising them (in both money and time) are flat fixed costs that don't double and triple with the second and third kid. The younger kids get the benefit of our having learned from (relatively minor, fortunately) mistakes raising the oldest. They work together on childhood projects in a way that makes helping 2 or 3 of them at a time *less* work than helping 1 alone would have been. And hopefully the benefits will continue to accrue to them; my wife and her older sister have been invaluable sources of support to each other for decades and I like to imagine my kids turning out the same way.
Also important is that they're individually surprisingly different people. They're both obvious mixes of my wife and I, but not in the way that blue and yellow make green, more like the way that HPMOR!Harry's shuffled "chromosome" papers make new discrete combinations. (there's got to be a less dorky reference to make here, but my kids all loved HPMOR too, so I'm sticking with that one) I know personality etc. are supposed to be very polygenetic, but our kids got a variety of different attributes, and seeing those contrasted against each other makes it easier to accept that they're just their own individual people, rather than assuming we're parenting "correctly" when a kid strongly shares a particular one of our strengths or avoids a certain flaw versus "incorrectly" when they don't. Even for utility that obviously has nothing to do with "correct" parenting, like the enjoyment of shared hobbies and interests, it's easier to "have it all", without pushing any of your kids into particular directions, when you can be confident that at least *one* of your kids is likely to enjoy whatever you expose them all to.
All that said, we've got people by the millions and billions now, and if that number goes down here or there we've got a *lot* of runway with which to fix the problem, or with which to wait for natural selection to get the problem to fix itself. IMHO the major short-term reason to worry about fertility drops is only that they may be symptomatic of deeper underlying social problems. E.g. If people don't want to have kids that's their business, but the typical gap between TFR and desired fertility was around 1 the last time I checked, and if people aren't even getting to have the kids they do want then it's worth looking into why not.
But I note that when talking about the benefits of more children, you mostly talked about benefits *to the children* or about *not increasing costs* to the parents. In terms of positive new benefits to the parents, that mostly seems to be the insight of seeing how shuffling the same DNA different ways gets you wildly different personalities. That's not nothing, but I hold that most of the novel benefits of having a children are captured in the first one. It's a 0-to-1 change, vs a 1-to-2 change.
There's definitely diminishing returns. I don't think it's just loss aversion that makes the slight regret I feel about not having a 4th kid less than the larger regret I believe I should feel if I hadn't had a 3rd or the gross mistake it would have been not to have any. I'm just quibbling about a "33% to 50%" estimate vs your "90%" here, and if I've talked you down to "most" (dare I translate that to 50%-60%?) then the remaining differences might just be down to sampling error on one side or the other. ;-)
Or maybe the difference is because I'm just thinking in terms of net joy rather than gross? For example, some of the value of the kids playing together is a new "wow it's great to watch from afar as my little people all interact" interesting experience for me, but part is just that the desire I feel to provide them with new interesting experiences themselves is now partly satisfied automatically with negative extra work on my part. I still choose to spend a lot of leisure time with my kids, but knowing that it's optional rather than necessary makes it feel like *free* time too.
Or maybe I'm just not distinguishing enough between the kids' benefits and my own? I've never been an Effective Altruist or even much of an ineffective one, and my stingy charitable giving has mostly been just an attempt to recognize how much others have helped me with things like college scholarships that I can "pay forward" in similar fashion ... but helping my own kids doesn't even feel like altruism, to such an extent that I had to read your reply slowly and remind myself, "oh, yeah, benefits to the kids and benefits to the parents are technically two separate things!"
That last possibility is IMHO a good reason to consider having more kids, but I admit it's also a reason to consider having 0. I can tell people that the changes to my utility function give me a whole class of opportunities for joy that I would never have appreciated before, but it's such a major change that you could imagine the same statement being made by a drug addict, and so someone in the pre-change state might reasonably be skeptical of making the change. I think I've heard this sort of dilemma called a "Vampire Problem", after another metaphor+cautionary-tale that fits the same pattern.
I think the second kid is also a 0-to-1 change, bcoz each kid has 1 sibling instead of 0. Having siblings means the kid is interacting with another kid at home. Without that, the kid has a very unnatural social life, something like being raised by wolves. Or look at it the other way around: it's like a horse being raised by humans. Nowadays, a lot of stallions are isolated from all other stallions as they're raised, because it's easier to do it that way. But the result is usually a non-socialized stallion who will fight every other stallion he meets if he gets the chance.
A big family is not like a small family. I think this might be because the more kids in a family, the less attention-demanding each kid is. Now some kids might still /require/ a lot of attention, but they usually /demand/ less attention. The more kids there are, the less each kid relies on the parents for approval.
I like this, and agree! But also I note that it's a 0-to-1 for the children. For the adults I don't think the new experiences they get are that drastically different from the new experiences they got going from no children to one child
I don’t think about it in terms of “experiences.” Each kid is a separate individual and not interchangeable. My experiences and interactions with each individual are unique.
If anything I wonder sometimes with the consequences of this perspective in the opposite direction. If I would fight all the forces of Hell to rescue any one of the three children I do have, then what about my hypothetical nonexistent 4th child who exists in an adjacent Everett branch? Should I feel bereft about the nonexistence of counterfactual children?
Intuitively: no, because I can have no relationship with a person who doesn’t exist, and I can feel nothing specific about their absence, whereas (as I said in the first bit) each of my 3 are distinct and non-fungible, and so it’s just fundamentally different.
But also, intuitively: yes, I feel a mild pull to rescue all 1,000,000 of my potential distinct nonexistent counterfactual children from oblivion, and on a long enough timeline I might just try to make that happen.
The 21st century is going to be so interesting. The closest thing I have approaching a guru is René Guénon, the leader of the perennialists, who said that our present civilization, due to not being built on transcendental principles, is fated to end in a cataclysm. Meanwhile, you have the rationalists, who agree that this can all end in cataclysm, but also see the possibility that we're on the path to the ultimate vindication of the modern worldview that Guénon railed strenously against, when the Singularity happens.
Two very thoroughly realized, and very opposed, worldviews are going to go through their trial by fire this century.
Interesting, interesting, interesting!
Could it be that both will be vindicated, however? Kali Yuga may end in a cataclysm, but its end means the beginning of Satya Yuga: the era of truth. No rationalist would reject truth, and spirituality is also, ultimately, about truth.
It is difficult to tell how broadly you define your "society" and "culture," so perhaps I am misreading some nuances of your argument. However...
Your "society of humans I relate to" has always been doomed, with or without demographic collapse. I'm not sure where you get the idea that descendants of your "society," or the descendants of the Taliban, or the descendants of Amish, will accept the societies they inherit, because that is not what history looks like. Our descendants will change society, guaranteed, and you won't like all the changes. Even if some cultures remain relatively static for long periods, those periods always end, and the rate of change has been accelerating for hundreds of years, so those static periods become fewer and shorter. The society that you live in (USA) is in a constant state of flux.
On the immortality option - While I am not opposed to living longer, the idea of only having children every century or so, while it might work in creating a more static society, would reduce human adaptability, much of which comes through the infusion of new blood, new unique human beings who are not clones of our genes or our conclusions. A bunch of young looking geezers would be too slow to change. A more likely path to extinction than current replacement level concerns.
But then you did state that your concern is not so much the survival of the species, but that of your society. Even going so far as to be willing to take steps to prevent the wrong people from inheriting the earth, so to speak. This seems a rather naive assumption about the relative quality of your society as it relates to future alternatives. And it dismisses the possibility that a better society might emerge from the offspring of other cultures. All you need to do is look at your own ancestors' societies and those aspects which you now disown and ask yourself if it would have been a good thing if they could have locked things down so that you would be stuck in one of those past societies.
The dynamism and vigor of the human race is inseparably tied to the fact that we die and are replaced by our offspring. Had we been methuselahs from the start, we might still be living in caves. Creatures that reproduce by division have a sort of immortality, but they are dumb as rocks.
And I disagree with your analysis of the selfish benefits of children. What if your one and only dies (suicide, accident, murder, war…). Where will your 90% benefit be? So, from a purely selfish standpoint, you could look at additional children as an insurance policy. And if your one child has no children, regardless of the reason, you won't get the benefits of grandparenthood. And there is a joy in seeing the talents of your children flourish, but with only one child, you only get one set of talents, so you miss out on a wide range of joys, interesting experiences, and revelations of meaning. To have only a son, misses the joys of having a daughter, and vice versa. No, you don't get anywhere close to 90%.
But that, to me, is beside the point, because I am one of those "excited and joyously motivated" people. I had five children and would have gladly taken more. I now have 11 grandchildren with more on the way. And the most wonderful thing I have ever seen, in my admittedly limited experience in the universe, is a human being (though I admit they can also be the most vile). Despite all the pain and suffering humans cause me, I think they are fascinating and lovable and precious (sometimes you have to scrub off several layers of dirt to see it).
You can't prevent your society and culture from extinction, but you can try to prevent your species’ extinction. And you can create beings capable of hope and joy. What higher aspiration can there be?
And for those who don’t know me, the answer is No, I’m agnostic.
> Your "society of humans I relate to" has always been doomed, with or without demographic collapse.
This is a good point. But there's a difference between "my grandchildren will live in the society that descended from a strong Christian tradition" and "my grandchildren will be raised in a preliterate Polynesian nature-worship culture." Their both not the society I live in, but one is alien in a way the other is not.
> the idea of only having children every century or so, while it might work in creating a more static society, would reduce human adaptability
Once a century was a number picked cuz it's round. People could have children far more frequently if they want (or less frequently!). And in the post-human future I think human adaptability will come from direct intervention (resetting brain-plasticity to states similar to one's late childhood or early teens) or from creating new people to-order as needed, rather than from a stochastic process of birthing a ton of people and seeing who adapts and survives the best. I don't know if it'll be *better* that way ^^; But I don't expect population turn-over to be important to adaptation in practice. If nothing else it's too costly and too slow. I think society and the human race will accelerate in how quickly it changes as we go forward, even with plummeting birthrates and increased lifespans, rather than ossifying.
> it dismisses the possibility that a better society might emerge from the offspring of other cultures.
I am of one such emerging society. :) "Dismissing that a better society might emerge" is literally the opposite of my position. I hold we should not kill off all the current societies we have and regress down to a handful that are extremely good at churning out lots of babies. That is the current dynamic -- forcing optimization for societies that have tons of offspring. I'm interested in the growth and existence of societies that don't do that. I'm pointing out that if nothing changes, all these other potentially-better societies will die.
> What if your one and only dies [...] And if your one child has no children, regardless of the reason...
Yes, I explicitly said we all will need to have 3+ children. I think you may be reading an argument you had with someone else into my words, because these counterpoints aren't arguing against me.
> No, you don't get anywhere close to 90%.
Perhaps this requires a bit more background context if you're new to the blog. The hedonic benefits of having a child are for the experiences it brings into your life that you wouldn't have had if you didn't have a child. Having a second child doesn't bring significantly more novel experiences of the caliber that's the difference between having NO children and having one child. see: https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/spirituality-of-aesthetics
> I now have 11 grandchildren with more on the way. And the most wonderful thing I have ever seen
I am very happy for you. :) Truly. And I am somewhat envious. It is too late for me to have this in my lifetime (unless we do fix ageing). It sounds wonderful.
> And you can create beings capable of hope and joy. What higher aspiration can there be?
Reading “Spirituality of Aesthetics” explains some things. My thoughts on something similar have been along the lines of each moment in your life always existing, and you are passing through them, and you always will be. I wouldn’t say I believe it, but it is interesting and possible.
On to your main topic, that of preserving societies.
“I hold we should not kill off all the current societies we have and regress down to a handful that are extremely good at churning out lots of babies. That is the current dynamic...”
An observation: The current dynamic has always been the dynamic (maybe you already know this). Birthrate decline is the norm in empires and affluent societies. The empires go into decline, get overrun and infused with other cultures that have more babies, and the cycle goes on.
I gather that you are saying you want to stop that cycle.
That cycle makes for some interesting blends and advances and growth in human awareness and knowledge. Stopping it may inhibit human growth.
In thinking about your immortality option, this immortality would have to be universal, else the baby making cultures would overrun your society anyway (unless you erect some sort of impenetrable barrier, thereby speciating the human race).
Also, "resetting brain-plasticity" might help to some degree in keeping the old ones mentally fresh, but unless you wipe a person's memory (no thanks), that person will still reach most of the same conclusions. Yes, I know they would have more time to learn and improve, but part of what leads young people to be innovative is their ignorance and naiveté. Plasticity won't bring that back.
And finally, that this society churning cycle consistently shows up in history would indicate that it is a product of human nature. What is it that you hope to alter by technology, human nature or some workaround of human nature? Alter the nature, and you will alter the societies rather than preserve them.
I generally don't comment on the internet, so I hope my tone in both responses won't be misconstrued as hostile. The topic is interesting and worth discussion, I just prefer doing it in person over a beer. I am also not used to inserting emoticons to substitute for body language, like a dog wagging its tail to show its friendliness. :-)
IMHO you get less than 50% (though much more than 33%) of the utility of 3 children (what I have) with just 1 (what my parents had), especially in the present day (when most kids have far less nearby extended family and neighbor children) and assuming you can have kids close enough together in age. With 3 kids, each of them nearly always has someone to play with (even if one of their two siblings is busy), as well as a non-authority-figure to talk with. Two of them have at least one easily relatable role model to look up to, and two of them have at least one junior looking up to them. Many of the costs of raising them (in both money and time) are flat fixed costs that don't double and triple with the second and third kid. The younger kids get the benefit of our having learned from (relatively minor, fortunately) mistakes raising the oldest. They work together on childhood projects in a way that makes helping 2 or 3 of them at a time *less* work than helping 1 alone would have been. And hopefully the benefits will continue to accrue to them; my wife and her older sister have been invaluable sources of support to each other for decades and I like to imagine my kids turning out the same way.
Also important is that they're individually surprisingly different people. They're both obvious mixes of my wife and I, but not in the way that blue and yellow make green, more like the way that HPMOR!Harry's shuffled "chromosome" papers make new discrete combinations. (there's got to be a less dorky reference to make here, but my kids all loved HPMOR too, so I'm sticking with that one) I know personality etc. are supposed to be very polygenetic, but our kids got a variety of different attributes, and seeing those contrasted against each other makes it easier to accept that they're just their own individual people, rather than assuming we're parenting "correctly" when a kid strongly shares a particular one of our strengths or avoids a certain flaw versus "incorrectly" when they don't. Even for utility that obviously has nothing to do with "correct" parenting, like the enjoyment of shared hobbies and interests, it's easier to "have it all", without pushing any of your kids into particular directions, when you can be confident that at least *one* of your kids is likely to enjoy whatever you expose them all to.
All that said, we've got people by the millions and billions now, and if that number goes down here or there we've got a *lot* of runway with which to fix the problem, or with which to wait for natural selection to get the problem to fix itself. IMHO the major short-term reason to worry about fertility drops is only that they may be symptomatic of deeper underlying social problems. E.g. If people don't want to have kids that's their business, but the typical gap between TFR and desired fertility was around 1 the last time I checked, and if people aren't even getting to have the kids they do want then it's worth looking into why not.
First, I agree with all of this. :) Great points!
But I note that when talking about the benefits of more children, you mostly talked about benefits *to the children* or about *not increasing costs* to the parents. In terms of positive new benefits to the parents, that mostly seems to be the insight of seeing how shuffling the same DNA different ways gets you wildly different personalities. That's not nothing, but I hold that most of the novel benefits of having a children are captured in the first one. It's a 0-to-1 change, vs a 1-to-2 change.
There's definitely diminishing returns. I don't think it's just loss aversion that makes the slight regret I feel about not having a 4th kid less than the larger regret I believe I should feel if I hadn't had a 3rd or the gross mistake it would have been not to have any. I'm just quibbling about a "33% to 50%" estimate vs your "90%" here, and if I've talked you down to "most" (dare I translate that to 50%-60%?) then the remaining differences might just be down to sampling error on one side or the other. ;-)
Or maybe the difference is because I'm just thinking in terms of net joy rather than gross? For example, some of the value of the kids playing together is a new "wow it's great to watch from afar as my little people all interact" interesting experience for me, but part is just that the desire I feel to provide them with new interesting experiences themselves is now partly satisfied automatically with negative extra work on my part. I still choose to spend a lot of leisure time with my kids, but knowing that it's optional rather than necessary makes it feel like *free* time too.
Or maybe I'm just not distinguishing enough between the kids' benefits and my own? I've never been an Effective Altruist or even much of an ineffective one, and my stingy charitable giving has mostly been just an attempt to recognize how much others have helped me with things like college scholarships that I can "pay forward" in similar fashion ... but helping my own kids doesn't even feel like altruism, to such an extent that I had to read your reply slowly and remind myself, "oh, yeah, benefits to the kids and benefits to the parents are technically two separate things!"
That last possibility is IMHO a good reason to consider having more kids, but I admit it's also a reason to consider having 0. I can tell people that the changes to my utility function give me a whole class of opportunities for joy that I would never have appreciated before, but it's such a major change that you could imagine the same statement being made by a drug addict, and so someone in the pre-change state might reasonably be skeptical of making the change. I think I've heard this sort of dilemma called a "Vampire Problem", after another metaphor+cautionary-tale that fits the same pattern.
Ah! That helps me to adjust my models, thank you!
I think the second kid is also a 0-to-1 change, bcoz each kid has 1 sibling instead of 0. Having siblings means the kid is interacting with another kid at home. Without that, the kid has a very unnatural social life, something like being raised by wolves. Or look at it the other way around: it's like a horse being raised by humans. Nowadays, a lot of stallions are isolated from all other stallions as they're raised, because it's easier to do it that way. But the result is usually a non-socialized stallion who will fight every other stallion he meets if he gets the chance.
A big family is not like a small family. I think this might be because the more kids in a family, the less attention-demanding each kid is. Now some kids might still /require/ a lot of attention, but they usually /demand/ less attention. The more kids there are, the less each kid relies on the parents for approval.
I like this, and agree! But also I note that it's a 0-to-1 for the children. For the adults I don't think the new experiences they get are that drastically different from the new experiences they got going from no children to one child
I don’t think about it in terms of “experiences.” Each kid is a separate individual and not interchangeable. My experiences and interactions with each individual are unique.
If anything I wonder sometimes with the consequences of this perspective in the opposite direction. If I would fight all the forces of Hell to rescue any one of the three children I do have, then what about my hypothetical nonexistent 4th child who exists in an adjacent Everett branch? Should I feel bereft about the nonexistence of counterfactual children?
Intuitively: no, because I can have no relationship with a person who doesn’t exist, and I can feel nothing specific about their absence, whereas (as I said in the first bit) each of my 3 are distinct and non-fungible, and so it’s just fundamentally different.
But also, intuitively: yes, I feel a mild pull to rescue all 1,000,000 of my potential distinct nonexistent counterfactual children from oblivion, and on a long enough timeline I might just try to make that happen.
The 21st century is going to be so interesting. The closest thing I have approaching a guru is René Guénon, the leader of the perennialists, who said that our present civilization, due to not being built on transcendental principles, is fated to end in a cataclysm. Meanwhile, you have the rationalists, who agree that this can all end in cataclysm, but also see the possibility that we're on the path to the ultimate vindication of the modern worldview that Guénon railed strenously against, when the Singularity happens.
Two very thoroughly realized, and very opposed, worldviews are going to go through their trial by fire this century.
Interesting, interesting, interesting!
Could it be that both will be vindicated, however? Kali Yuga may end in a cataclysm, but its end means the beginning of Satya Yuga: the era of truth. No rationalist would reject truth, and spirituality is also, ultimately, about truth.
"Don’t summon up eldritch gods to fix your problems, you’ll never be happy with the result." -- Good life advice I wish my parents had told me.
It is difficult to tell how broadly you define your "society" and "culture," so perhaps I am misreading some nuances of your argument. However...
Your "society of humans I relate to" has always been doomed, with or without demographic collapse. I'm not sure where you get the idea that descendants of your "society," or the descendants of the Taliban, or the descendants of Amish, will accept the societies they inherit, because that is not what history looks like. Our descendants will change society, guaranteed, and you won't like all the changes. Even if some cultures remain relatively static for long periods, those periods always end, and the rate of change has been accelerating for hundreds of years, so those static periods become fewer and shorter. The society that you live in (USA) is in a constant state of flux.
On the immortality option - While I am not opposed to living longer, the idea of only having children every century or so, while it might work in creating a more static society, would reduce human adaptability, much of which comes through the infusion of new blood, new unique human beings who are not clones of our genes or our conclusions. A bunch of young looking geezers would be too slow to change. A more likely path to extinction than current replacement level concerns.
But then you did state that your concern is not so much the survival of the species, but that of your society. Even going so far as to be willing to take steps to prevent the wrong people from inheriting the earth, so to speak. This seems a rather naive assumption about the relative quality of your society as it relates to future alternatives. And it dismisses the possibility that a better society might emerge from the offspring of other cultures. All you need to do is look at your own ancestors' societies and those aspects which you now disown and ask yourself if it would have been a good thing if they could have locked things down so that you would be stuck in one of those past societies.
The dynamism and vigor of the human race is inseparably tied to the fact that we die and are replaced by our offspring. Had we been methuselahs from the start, we might still be living in caves. Creatures that reproduce by division have a sort of immortality, but they are dumb as rocks.
And I disagree with your analysis of the selfish benefits of children. What if your one and only dies (suicide, accident, murder, war…). Where will your 90% benefit be? So, from a purely selfish standpoint, you could look at additional children as an insurance policy. And if your one child has no children, regardless of the reason, you won't get the benefits of grandparenthood. And there is a joy in seeing the talents of your children flourish, but with only one child, you only get one set of talents, so you miss out on a wide range of joys, interesting experiences, and revelations of meaning. To have only a son, misses the joys of having a daughter, and vice versa. No, you don't get anywhere close to 90%.
But that, to me, is beside the point, because I am one of those "excited and joyously motivated" people. I had five children and would have gladly taken more. I now have 11 grandchildren with more on the way. And the most wonderful thing I have ever seen, in my admittedly limited experience in the universe, is a human being (though I admit they can also be the most vile). Despite all the pain and suffering humans cause me, I think they are fascinating and lovable and precious (sometimes you have to scrub off several layers of dirt to see it).
You can't prevent your society and culture from extinction, but you can try to prevent your species’ extinction. And you can create beings capable of hope and joy. What higher aspiration can there be?
And for those who don’t know me, the answer is No, I’m agnostic.
> Your "society of humans I relate to" has always been doomed, with or without demographic collapse.
This is a good point. But there's a difference between "my grandchildren will live in the society that descended from a strong Christian tradition" and "my grandchildren will be raised in a preliterate Polynesian nature-worship culture." Their both not the society I live in, but one is alien in a way the other is not.
> the idea of only having children every century or so, while it might work in creating a more static society, would reduce human adaptability
Once a century was a number picked cuz it's round. People could have children far more frequently if they want (or less frequently!). And in the post-human future I think human adaptability will come from direct intervention (resetting brain-plasticity to states similar to one's late childhood or early teens) or from creating new people to-order as needed, rather than from a stochastic process of birthing a ton of people and seeing who adapts and survives the best. I don't know if it'll be *better* that way ^^; But I don't expect population turn-over to be important to adaptation in practice. If nothing else it's too costly and too slow. I think society and the human race will accelerate in how quickly it changes as we go forward, even with plummeting birthrates and increased lifespans, rather than ossifying.
> it dismisses the possibility that a better society might emerge from the offspring of other cultures.
I am of one such emerging society. :) "Dismissing that a better society might emerge" is literally the opposite of my position. I hold we should not kill off all the current societies we have and regress down to a handful that are extremely good at churning out lots of babies. That is the current dynamic -- forcing optimization for societies that have tons of offspring. I'm interested in the growth and existence of societies that don't do that. I'm pointing out that if nothing changes, all these other potentially-better societies will die.
> What if your one and only dies [...] And if your one child has no children, regardless of the reason...
Yes, I explicitly said we all will need to have 3+ children. I think you may be reading an argument you had with someone else into my words, because these counterpoints aren't arguing against me.
> No, you don't get anywhere close to 90%.
Perhaps this requires a bit more background context if you're new to the blog. The hedonic benefits of having a child are for the experiences it brings into your life that you wouldn't have had if you didn't have a child. Having a second child doesn't bring significantly more novel experiences of the caliber that's the difference between having NO children and having one child. see: https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/spirituality-of-aesthetics
> I now have 11 grandchildren with more on the way. And the most wonderful thing I have ever seen
I am very happy for you. :) Truly. And I am somewhat envious. It is too late for me to have this in my lifetime (unless we do fix ageing). It sounds wonderful.
> And you can create beings capable of hope and joy. What higher aspiration can there be?
Strongly agree! :D
Reading “Spirituality of Aesthetics” explains some things. My thoughts on something similar have been along the lines of each moment in your life always existing, and you are passing through them, and you always will be. I wouldn’t say I believe it, but it is interesting and possible.
On to your main topic, that of preserving societies.
“I hold we should not kill off all the current societies we have and regress down to a handful that are extremely good at churning out lots of babies. That is the current dynamic...”
An observation: The current dynamic has always been the dynamic (maybe you already know this). Birthrate decline is the norm in empires and affluent societies. The empires go into decline, get overrun and infused with other cultures that have more babies, and the cycle goes on.
I gather that you are saying you want to stop that cycle.
That cycle makes for some interesting blends and advances and growth in human awareness and knowledge. Stopping it may inhibit human growth.
In thinking about your immortality option, this immortality would have to be universal, else the baby making cultures would overrun your society anyway (unless you erect some sort of impenetrable barrier, thereby speciating the human race).
Also, "resetting brain-plasticity" might help to some degree in keeping the old ones mentally fresh, but unless you wipe a person's memory (no thanks), that person will still reach most of the same conclusions. Yes, I know they would have more time to learn and improve, but part of what leads young people to be innovative is their ignorance and naiveté. Plasticity won't bring that back.
And finally, that this society churning cycle consistently shows up in history would indicate that it is a product of human nature. What is it that you hope to alter by technology, human nature or some workaround of human nature? Alter the nature, and you will alter the societies rather than preserve them.
I generally don't comment on the internet, so I hope my tone in both responses won't be misconstrued as hostile. The topic is interesting and worth discussion, I just prefer doing it in person over a beer. I am also not used to inserting emoticons to substitute for body language, like a dog wagging its tail to show its friendliness. :-)