"I therefore urge you to do as I did, and have no children."
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?
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.
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.
I appreciate having children makes it hard to think about these things straight, but producing less children really is the only way (short of killing others) out of overpopulation and all that it's doing to our planet.
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.
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.
Although I'm me, I'm also in general, so I'll take a stab.
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.
>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.
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"?
Rationalizing having children on the ground that the children of a smart person will be smart and therefore an advantage to the world ... isn't very smart.
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.
I'm not sure that's how RTM works. As I understand it, RTM is talking about the distribution of an uncorrelated variable and says that they'll trend towards the average on the second measurement. It doesn't seem to say that they'll be average with respect to a given correlate. Some schools are persistently better over time, for instance even if on the second measurement they trend closer to the average and then subsequently further away and then... that's just saying that it's not a perfect correlate and you've got noise in your data.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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, 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.
He is entitled to his own opinion. I am glad for the four children I have, who I expect will be net contributors to the well-being of humanity.
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.
I was certainly willing to adopt children if I had no prospect of having biologically descended children. Having received my higher education at a world center of much research on adopted children and the influence of adoptive parents on those children,
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.
We are all part of the same human race. But it is a fact that my marriage to a woman from Taiwan would have been illegal in some states of the United States until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional silly state statutes that treated "races" as actual discrete categories. I'm proud to say that Minnesota never had such idiotic laws.
Stallman might not have thought this through or not realized how the pressues of evolution will eventually nullify his choice. For all those who make a conscious decision to avoid having kids, those who are genetically fitter at resisting the urge to reproduce are therefore less likely to pass on their genes. Also, of course those who don't bother resisting or have less genetic inclination to avoid reproducing are more likely to. Thus the next generation will inherit the genes of parents with less resistance to reproduction. Thus if the theory of evolution is true, and all other things are equal, the next generation will be more likely to reproduce. This cycle would repeat until the genes of those who decline to reproduce to save humanity are no longer in the gene pool. Thus Stallmans choice is only effective over a very short number of generations.
Not only that, if those who are more likely to decline to have kids is a good quality, they are actually hurting future generations by removing themselves from contributing it to future generations. This is of course their right.
This is not a new idea, the idea that population controls are doomed to failure is main idea of the novel 'The Mote in God's Eye' by Niven and Pournelle.
The problem is real of course. However, when considering reproduction, which is so intimately tied with evolution, perhaps one should be aware of the consequences of evolution or possibly even use it when trying to solve the problem. Unless those who have fewer offspring are more likely to pass their genes on to the next generation, those in the next generation will have genes that favor more offspring.
I don't think overpopulation should ever be a factor in determining if you want to have a child or not. A layperson has no responsibility nor influence in that matter - that's something for policymakers and implementers to handle. You should decide on a child based on your situation and desires.
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.
> I don't think overpopulation should ever be a factor in determining if you want to have a child or not. A layperson has no responsibility nor influence in that matter - that's something for policymakers and implementers to handle.
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?
>I don't think overpopulation should ever be a factor in determining if you want to have a child or not. A layperson has no responsibility nor influence in that matter - that's something for policymakers and implementers to handle.
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.
> A layperson has no responsibility nor influence in that matter - that's something for policymakers and implementers to handle
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.
It's always commendable to do your own share, but at the individual level, a single layperson choosing not to have kids won't have any significant affect on overpopulation. What matters is the actions of a large group of people, which is determined by culture makers and policy makers.
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.
> at the individual level, a single layperson choosing not to have kids won't have any significant affect on overpopulation.
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.
A well raised person can probably offset his net direct impact. The point made by Stallman is that this person has no possibility to asses (much less offset) his descendants impact (children, children's children, ...)
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.
> First of all, it disregards the tremendous disaster that global heating and destruction of the natural world are leading towards. 30 years from now, large parts of humanity will probably find it hard to get water or food, let alone contraception.
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.
>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.
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.
Increasingly smaller fraction of humanity is has a problem getting water or food, from almost everyone not that long ago, through 40% of the world population in the 1980s to less than 20% nowadays. This change is due to economic growth, which in turn is influenced primarily by the technological progress, also by politics, governance, and culture, as you say, but also by the population growth--when there are more people the economy grows faster.
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.
Wow, all of the fathers are coming out of the woodwork to justify their decisions. I, for one, agree with him. Some levels of dedication aren't possible when your attention is diverted to offspring constantly.
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.
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.
Smart people don't only come from smart parents. While I'm sure there's a factor, I suspect the part of genetics is overstated in intelligence. Or, to put it another way, maybe we should earnestly focus on educating the kids we have as well as we can.
A rather poor critique. Ad hominem, GP doesn't mention himself, though might be implying Stallman adds more to society than gang-bangers. I'd tend to agree.
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.
Nice try. It's well known that the uneducated don't do much family planning. A comic that says the opposite with zero to back it up is worth the paper its printed on.
I'm not sure what the official stance on this is, but I always thought "fewer" was used in the case of discrete subjects, and "less" in the case of continuous. So it's always amusing when someone talks about "less people".
Thanks for pointing that out, mkingston! I went with "less people" because it sounded funnier (to me) than "fewer people" (which did sound more grammatically correct).
I don't buy the overpopulation argument. There is good evidence to suggest that after 2050 the human population is going to decline and might reach as low as 2 billion people in the very long term.
After 2050? How many would have to die from diseases, hunger and political tensions (countries grabbing for resources) until then? What impact will 40 more years of population increase?
Well, that is the point. Human nature is such that population has always stabilized slightly above carrying capacity (being the amount of population that the ecosystem+technology can sustain).
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.
>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.
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).
it just is either or -- or probability wise close to it. from the time and demand it takes to be a good parent, to the many things you have to do to afford children, to the fact that being responsible for somebody makes you largely beholden to people with money and health insurance, it just is.
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.
Well, if that is how you feel about children, not having them is probably a good idea. I'm not criticizing him, even if it might sound like that, just pointing out that his decision might be righ for him.
i hope we overpopulate the heck out of this planet, maybe once we're shoulder to shoulder on every sq meter we'll have the necessary impetus to get off this damned rock...
Yes, because "impetus" is all it takes, and the laws of physics like the speed of light, energy needs, scale of such a project etc, have little play into this...
Isn't it crazy that the more education a woman has, the fewer children she has? You would hope that the more educated would have more, since they would be better able to care for and educate their children.
This guy. Remember the Monsters of Springfield episode of "The Simpsons"? Where the song was "Just Don't Look, Just Don't Look"? That's how I feel about him. After a decade of rediculous statements and vastly decreasing returns, it's time to stop paying any sort of attention to RMS.
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?