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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Tentative Reasons You Might Be Underrating Having Kids, published by burner on May 9, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. The decision to have children is about whether you believe they will enrich your life, whether you would like to spend your time rearing children, and whether you believe your children will have good lives. Nevertheless, there are occasional instrumentalist arguments about whether EAs should have children given our unique goals and ethical commitments. As Linch comments on this helpful post: The strongest reason to have children is because you or your partner would personally be happier or more productive if you had children. The second strongest reason is if you think childrearing is actually the most cost-effective thing for you to do on the margin because of the effects of the children themselves, but at least for me, on the current margin, the burden of proof should be against. I believe this sort of thinking, while reasonable and well-intentioned, is too short-sighted. Perhaps it is individually rational but irrational for EAs as a group and movement. This has been addressed in other places before (Abby Hoskin’s comment, David Manheim’s comment). I also don’t necessarily think there are compelling EA motivations to have children if you have never been interested in having children, rather that if you are interested in having children the reasons not to do so are far less clear-cut than is commonly suggested. So with those caveats, here are some tentative but plausible additional reasons why it might be good to have children: Object-level worries about depopulation It seems possible that world population will decline in absolute terms in this century, possibly as early as 2070. If that happens, we may see the end of economic growth. This could cause us to be stuck in a time of perils, with virtually no means of escape. After all, with a small population (and good ideas being harder to find), it will be incredibly hard to push the technological frontier. Leopold Aschenbrenner writes about these possibilities in his GPI report, Existential Risk and Growth and they are discussed further in Will MacAskill’s forthcoming, What We Owe the Future. Obviously the likelihood of this scenario depends on a number of factors and assumptions, including AI timelines. But if this scenario seems plausible to you, increasing fertility becomes an important moral priority and having children is likely to be a precondition for effective advocacy. EA community health and growth More specific to EA: As a number of people had pointed out in the past, if not having children became an implicit requirement to be a “good” member of the EA community, it would be detrimental to community growth-Many talented people would find the prospect of giving up having children unappealing, if not repellant. Not only that, it could significantly detract from the general soft power or cultural influence of EA if we became known as “the people who think they are too important/busy to have children.” But the contrapositive is similarly powerful: If EAs were known for having high-functioning, responsible families, this may have the benefit of growing the community. It seems to be a key way that religions (Mormonism is an obvious example) attract members. Values Propagation While shared environment effects are typically very small across the board, there are two areas where they are quite strong: Religion and politics. Without indulging the, “Is EA a religion debate,” it seems likely that there would be a similar transfer of values given the role EA plays in the lives of people it inspires. In fact, it may have inter-generational advantages over traditional religions, as it has liberal social values that typically become cruxes between parents and children regarding religion. If EA is ge...