Watching her friends and my friends' wives go through it, we've been scared off.
Add to that, the usual HN phenomenon that we're observing how the world and our countries (USA & Korea) seem be going down the toilet, and that makes us feel hesitant to bring a new human being into the world, especially when there are kids already here that could use a loving family.
The world has always been going down the toilet. The only difference now is that we have higher visibility of and lower tolerance for the bullshit. You shouldn’t be so pessimistic.
The other difference now is that we're pretty close to wiping out crucial ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest and show no signs of taking climate change as seriously as we should.
I was downvoted in my other comment, so I think I should explain what I meant.
My point was that there is no “we” when we speak of humanity as a broad aggregate this way. There are specific constituencies—for instance, Bolsenaro and his supporters in Brazil—who are blocking the policies that most of us want to implement to stop climate change. It’s not “we” who are the problem, it’s “them”.
If you blame humanity in the aggregate you misdirect your energies and misidentify the solution.
The thing to do is to apply the appropriate political levers to weaken and oppose the constituencies who prioritize status-quo fossil-fuel energy policies over civilizational stability and the well-being of life on Earth. Blaming all of humanity is the equivalent of giving up and doing nothing, and makes the problem worse.
But still, the word has really been going down the toilet for humans for a long time, famines, wars, plagues, pandemics. It's all been going down the shit shoot for a long time. But then you see a nice sunset, eat a decent meal and feel lucky. If my children get to experience some of those simple pleasures, maybe it's mission accomplished ?
Great comment. Your absolutely right. I'm often personally far too pessimistic about the future (climate change, nuclear annihilation, etc). There is no real benefit to such pessimism.
I agree with you in many ways, but I think humanity has never had this level of capability to destroy the earth. We'll either be unable to breathe freely or lose most of civilization in a nuclear war by the end of the century.
Not to detract, but "one kid" would only make the problem worse because a woman needs to give birth to at least two children in order for population counts at large to maintain parity.
That is, one kid per woman halves the population. If the axiom is at least maintaining, ideally growing the population, every woman needs to give birth to at least two and ideally three or more kids.
Of course, this isn't to say I'm telling other people what to do regarding offspring, because I hate that kind of intrusive attitude. I've already decided I'm having no kids, because fuck the human world; and anyone who comes bitching at me about it one way or another can take a hike and pound sand. So I'm not going to be hypocritical and turn around and tell other people what to do in the bedroom.
But if the purpose for all the noise behind childbearing is to take population count trends out of the negatives, advising "one kid" not only doesn't help solve the problem but actively makes it worse.
Within the wider context of population decline due to low birth rates, both are bad because both lead to population decline anyway. 2 kids is a hard minimum for maintaining population count, 3 or more kids for increasing population.
As for what decafninja (or any individual for that matter) decides upon in the bedroom, that's for him to decide and his business alone. I'm not going to comment because it's none of my business.
Because the longtermists are betting on 10^58 humans being alive one day. If you don't have children and population growth isn't exponential anymore their whole ideology comes crashing down.
If people voluntarily self limit the size of the population that is a good thing because it means we won't need to shoot each other if it turns out we are straining the earth too much.
You're asking the wrong guy; I don't care either way. :P
I'm just pointing out that in a wider discussion of "oh noes population decline oh noes low birth rates", it's not constructive to be talking about having 1 kid when there's a hard minimum of having 2 kids and ideally more.
Yeah, this is not to be underestimated in the context of Korea and Korean culture.
Thankfully, in our case, our parents don't care, and neither do we.
I'm also an only child, as is my wife, so this means both our branches of our families' genetic bloodlines are effectively ending (albeit the onus for this is on the male side). But again - we don't care.
Counterpoint: our species has very little genetic diversity, we’re all pretty closely related. The odds that there’s there’s something unique or special about any one person’s lineage is pretty low.
It depends on the difference, because genetic differences aren't always beneficial. The Hapsburg Dynasty's Charles II famously had an inherited birth defect due to the heavy inbreeding[1] among the ruling class, for example. It was of no value to anyone.
The true reason for valuing lineages is more about social rank/class protectionism.
The value of that intermarriage was ability to maintain an empire of significant power and influence, as well balance relationships with nearby royals, who were all cousins.
"no value" here is probably in tens, maybe hundreds of trillions of dollars in the present time PPP basis.
I heard the most bizarre & unexpected opinion first-hand from an obgyn. Prior to this I was firmly in the nurture camp of nature/nurture, but this obgyn's opinion on adoptions shocked me out of my complacency.
I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.
Curious as to what you mean. I think you're implying that the personality makeup of the adopted child that comes from his/her biological parents is not to be underestimated? Is that really a questionable or controversial topic though?
The thought has occurred to me. I would describe both my wife and I as being stable mannered and not prone to rash decisions. Odds are a biological child of ours might resemble that personality.
I also acknowledge a child we adopt may have had biological parents with very different personalities than us, and therefore the child may be very different from us in personality.
At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care.
> At the same time, I don't believe that just because the child's biological parents might have been wild and crazy, the child is doomed to the same fate even with our care
Tell me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers without telling me you haven't read many behavioral genetics papers :).
adoptee turned to hard drugs (opiods) in his teens. the opinion was: what do you expect, the father was an addict too. at the time I was shocked as I was so firmly in the nurture camp.
Addiction, and specifically OUD is complicated, but there is real evidence that genetics plays a sizeable role in the physiological dependence side of it.
However the main risk factor for trying and then abusing opioids, for example, is trauma, typically but not only in childhood. Basically, it’s both nature and nurture, as most things are. Where the percentages lie for both, I don’t think we know yet.
For instance parents who have genes that increase impulsivity are more likely to e beat their kids exposing them to trauma, the kids are more likely to do dumb things that expose themselves to trauma, and the kids are more likely to do impulsive things like try drugs.
So it's hard to disentangle what portion of the effects of trauma are direct and which are confounds.
Oh yeah, definitely. It's a complicated mess of variables, that I don't even know how one would begin to tease them apart, but that's also why I firmly come down on the side of "it's both" -- as not all trauma is directly from biological parents, for example.
yes, I agree with you. It's just at the time I was unaware that brain chemistry could be genetically dependent; although as you say that's pre-disposition, and the trigger can be trauma, and sometimes knowing you are adopted can be the source of that trauma, thus triggering the behaviour.
I can only speak from personal experience but that is what happened to my family. My brother is a sociopath who caused our family a lifetime of difficulty. The biological mother was drug addict and abusive before adoption and he became an addict. My sister also adopted from different family was less of a problem but also had some issues. My dad was very kind and not abusive and spent way too much trying to help. Who knows maybe it was environment and early abuse or something but nature stacked the deck I think in my family. The other issue with adoption is limited access to family medical history.
I don’t really understand your argument. Wearing dresses isn’t heritable, we know that because most women’s grandmothers wore dresses and most women wear jeans or casual wear.
Heritability isn’t proof that a trait is genetic, but it’s strong evidence once you start addressing confounding factors. As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
This is like shocking to me we’re even debating this. I would have assumed it’s conventional wisdom.
Wearing dresses is heritable! Heritability is simply the ratio of genetically-caused variation to total variation for some trait across a population. Bad driving is heritable. So is risk aversion. So is musical taste. So is how much TV you watch. All of these: studied.
Traits can trivially be minimally heritable and totally genetically determined. The number of fingers on your hands is genetically determined by your Hox genes. But the variation in the number of fingers on your hand (more precisely: across the population) is overwhelmingly not genetically determined. Genetically determined, low heritability.
Traits can trivially be maximally heritable and not at all genetically determined. Whether or not you wear lipstick is largely decided by XY vs. XX. But there's no gene for wearing lipstick; if the cultural ball had broken a different way, we might all be wearing lipstick, or none of us. Genetically unencumbered, high heritability.
So: you haven't said anything. You're not even wrong. All you pointed out was that you can do a study and determine that population variations in intelligence (or bad driving, or social trust, or fear of dentists) are traceable to genetic variance. That doesn't mean that genes literally encode the outcome.
Heritability isn't "strong evidence". It's barely evidence at all. It's literally just a framing of the question, which your argument simply begs. Irresponsibly, at that. None of this should be news to you.
I don't even have to take a position on the blighted question of whether intelligence is genetically determined (or whether we can measure it meaningfully at all, or whether it's fixed at birth or fluid, or whether outcomes in intellectual performance are epigenetic). And I'm not. I'm just pointing out that your argument, the one I replied to, was literally vacuous.
> As I recall, the IQ heritability research was done with twin studies.
No, it wasn't. Such a set up is impossible because of lack of samples and sampling bias.
All that "IQ is X% heritable" means is that they ran a linear regression on a large data set and saw that the variance error in the regression reduced by X% when they plugged in parental IQ as a covariate in the regression.
This is a correlational study as causal studies are impossible. Correlational studies are inherently spurious and ignore lots of confounding factors. Nevertheless, we can say that what we routinely observe in real life - smart parents having smart kids, has been grounded in real data.
For getting effect of race on IQ you plug in race as a covariate. Typically, most of the race based IQ research remove parental IQ as a covariate. All of these regression based studies are dubious and there is no real way to correct it. A large data set of twins who were separated at birth could help, but there are caveats there as well.
As an aside, Jordan Peterson seems to love these race IQ regression models and likes to call them hard undeniable science. He immediately switched sides when talking about climate models and how these models can't be trusted, because the simple choice of covariate included creates absolutely unreliable and biased models.
We have relatively strong evidence for a significant degree of genetic determinism in athletic ability (at least for some sports). We do not for intelligence.
