A brilliant schoolboy shot himself in the head after carefully calculating the benefits of life and deciding it was not worth living, an inquest was told yesterday.
…
“He was quite stoical about it. He did not fear death. He decided on balance that life is not good and points out that the mathematics he has used are indisputable.”
Birth rates certainly do plummet but I suspect, admittedly without having looked up the figures, that the effect has more to do with each couple having fewer children than with a substantial change in the number of people who choose not to have children at all.
People learn fast.
More seriously, a reduction in number per reproducing person is also evidence against the value of kids.
Imagine McDonald’s comes out with a new hamburger recipe replacing the previous hamburger, and marketing comes back telling you that total consumption has fallen 90%, that not only is your market share not growing any more, it’s actually shrinking, and something like a quarter of your customers no longer even eat a single hamburger, and the others are sufficiently disgusted that when they used to order 10 or as many as 15, now they only order 1 or 2 burgers.
Do you say that only the quarter matters, and the other customers who went from 10 to 1 says nothing about how delicious your new burger recipe is?
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| — | gwern on reddit |
that’s why it’s important to not use your child to save the world. or: every time i see the “i would never ever impose gender on my child!” posts or the “my child will wear amazing clothes and destroy the world with their fierceness” posts or the “my child will stand up to everything that is…
basically what that is doing is focusing the needs of the parent on the child. it’s like the social justice version of the dad who tries to force his son to play baseball. in other words—what if your kid is a bully? and you’ve set him all up to be the social justice genderless hero?
see what I mean? transformative justice is not molding your child to fit some dream that heals our past trauma—it is finally admitting that our children are their own little beings with their own needs and it’s not up to us to mold them into what we see as social justice warrior—but to mold this fucked up *world* into a safe place for them to become whatever fucking type of human being they need to become to actualize themselves as fully human and capable of receiving and giving tremendous love.
