6 ms·

Why it is important not to have children

31 points by NotUncivil 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago
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.
- gnosis 13y ago
  If you want to have children so that they will help humanity (just about the only unselfish justification for having children), why not adopt instead?
  - tokenadult 13y ago
    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, http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesota/dp/0674055462 http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesot... 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.
    - tshepang 13y ago
      Why is "interracial" in quotes?
      - tokenadult 13y ago
        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.
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- zurn 13y ago
  > 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 This argument would be equally (in)valid for any tragedy of the commons type situation, like CO2 emissions or fisheries depletion etc.
miles 13y ago
Rather similar to VHEMT's reasoning: http://www.vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#schopenquote http://www.vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#schopenquote though RMS states his goal is simply less humans, not no humans.
- mkingston 13y ago
  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".
  - miles 13y ago
    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).
bayesianhorse 13y ago
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.
- kaonashi 13y ago
  The decline would be due people having fewer children…
- coldtea 13y ago
  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?
  - gonvaled 13y ago
    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.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      >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).
mistermann 13y ago
> 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.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification
- pfedor 13y ago
  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.
olgeni 13y ago
In the beginning there was God, and the Word, and whatever. Then, they were replaced by the Selfish Gene, and Science looked like a winner for a while. Then came Stallman, with His Bright Idea: the Forrest Gump Gene That Watches Other Selfish Genes Thrive, And Then Dies. In the end, Selfish Parrots will eventually inherit the world, and Science will triumph again.
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a3n 13y ago
"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?
- Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
  The Church tried its best to lower the population's average IQ by encouraging the smartest boys to become priests. For ostensibly different reasons now we've got do-gooders doing exactly the same damned thing to us.
  - lutusp 13y ago
    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.
    - 6d0debc071 13y ago
      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.
geon 13y ago
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.
jeffehobbs 13y ago
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.
- coldtea 13y ago
  Your comment has almost zero content.
joelberman 13y ago
If you accept natural selection as a theory, the answer is obvious.
- aba_sababa 13y ago
  Not that there is a "right" or "wrong" answer if you want to invoke that. There is no "winning" at evolution.
digisign 13y ago
He's right, yet to anyone who's seen the movie Idiocracy the problem is obvious. The "hicks, vatos, and homeboyz" aren't going to stop breeding.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
  They'll quit breeding (or at least slow down considerably) if we cease to subsidize their reproduction at the expense of our own.
- mkingston 13y ago
  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.
  - mixmastamyk 13y ago
    Indeed, culture and education are likely more important. But, they start at home.
- gordaco 13y ago
  http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
- coldtea 13y ago
  >The "hicks, vatos, and homeboyz" aren't going to stop breeding. Or people thinking like you, for that matter. What exactly makes you think you are worth more than a "hick, vato or homeboy"? A high IQ? I'd take kindness, altruism and consideration for others any day. Not to mention your comment borders on full blown racism, stopping just short of the "n" word. http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
  - digisign 13y ago
    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.
tbrooks 13y ago
> Having no dependents, I could dedicate myself to what seemed right rather than to whatever someone with money wanted me to do. I don't buy the false choice of GNU/no children or children/no GNU. Why does it have to be either/or?
- datapimp 13y ago
  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.
  - Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
    If you want to do something revolutionary that potentially threatens the status quo, first you have to be born.
    - coldtea 13y ago
      Sure. But the question on this thread is if you also have to have offspring, which is orthogonal to being born yourself.
      - Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
        Some people want to make the world a better place by having families. To me this makes at least as much sense most plans for world-improvement.
        coldtea 13y ago
        What about having families makes the world a better place? Plenty of abusive, criminal, ..., families. Matter of fact, every negative historical figure was also born into a family.
jakeogh 13y ago
"The human population is expected to grow by 2 or 3 billion by 2050" That is the UN's low estimate. The median UN human population projection estimates that we peak at 10 billion people around 2100. Chart at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe (I wont pretend wikipedia is a source, the chart could be completely wroing, I have not crunched the numbers at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm myself) 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. There is an organization that argues the other side of Stallman's reasoning: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/category/categories/pop101 http://overpopulationisamyth.com/category/categories/pop101
maerF0x0 13y ago
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...
- coldtea 13y ago
  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...
dsowers 13y ago
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.
- datapimp 13y ago
  it is true. they're not. 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.
- deleted 13y ago
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lifeformed 13y ago
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.
- gonvaled 13y ago
  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.
- zurn 13y ago
  > 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.
  - lifeformed 13y ago
    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.
busticket 13y ago
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.
busticket 13y ago
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.
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flagnog 13y ago
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. Darwin would get a chuckle out of this.

31 points by NotUncivil 13y ago

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.

gnosis 13y ago
If you want to have children so that they will help humanity (just about the only unselfish justification for having children), why not adopt instead?
- tokenadult 13y ago
  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, http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesota/dp/0674055462 http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesot... 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.
  - tshepang 13y ago
    Why is "interracial" in quotes?
    - tokenadult 13y ago
      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.
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zurn 13y ago
> 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 This argument would be equally (in)valid for any tragedy of the commons type situation, like CO2 emissions or fisheries depletion etc.

miles 13y ago

Rather similar to VHEMT's reasoning: http://www.vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#schopenquote http://www.vhemt.org/biobreed.htm#schopenquote though RMS states his goal is simply less humans, not no humans.

mkingston 13y ago
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".
- miles 13y ago
  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).

bayesianhorse 13y ago

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.

kaonashi 13y ago
The decline would be due people having fewer children…
coldtea 13y ago
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?
- gonvaled 13y ago
  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.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >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).

mistermann 13y ago

> 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.

coldtea 13y ago
>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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification
pfedor 13y ago
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.

olgeni 13y ago

In the beginning there was God, and the Word, and whatever. Then, they were replaced by the Selfish Gene, and Science looked like a winner for a while. Then came Stallman, with His Bright Idea: the Forrest Gump Gene That Watches Other Selfish Genes Thrive, And Then Dies. In the end, Selfish Parrots will eventually inherit the world, and Science will triumph again.

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a3n 13y ago

"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?

Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
The Church tried its best to lower the population's average IQ by encouraging the smartest boys to become priests. For ostensibly different reasons now we've got do-gooders doing exactly the same damned thing to us.
- lutusp 13y ago
  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.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    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.

geon 13y ago

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.

jeffehobbs 13y ago

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.

coldtea 13y ago
Your comment has almost zero content.

joelberman 13y ago

If you accept natural selection as a theory, the answer is obvious.

aba_sababa 13y ago
Not that there is a "right" or "wrong" answer if you want to invoke that. There is no "winning" at evolution.

digisign 13y ago

He's right, yet to anyone who's seen the movie Idiocracy the problem is obvious. The "hicks, vatos, and homeboyz" aren't going to stop breeding.

Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
They'll quit breeding (or at least slow down considerably) if we cease to subsidize their reproduction at the expense of our own.
mkingston 13y ago
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.
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  Indeed, culture and education are likely more important. But, they start at home.
gordaco 13y ago
http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
coldtea 13y ago
>The "hicks, vatos, and homeboyz" aren't going to stop breeding. Or people thinking like you, for that matter. What exactly makes you think you are worth more than a "hick, vato or homeboy"? A high IQ? I'd take kindness, altruism and consideration for others any day. Not to mention your comment borders on full blown racism, stopping just short of the "n" word. http://xkcd.com/603/ http://xkcd.com/603/
- digisign 13y ago
  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.

tbrooks 13y ago

> Having no dependents, I could dedicate myself to what seemed right rather than to whatever someone with money wanted me to do. I don't buy the false choice of GNU/no children or children/no GNU. Why does it have to be either/or?

datapimp 13y ago
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.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
  If you want to do something revolutionary that potentially threatens the status quo, first you have to be born.
  - coldtea 13y ago
    Sure. But the question on this thread is if you also have to have offspring, which is orthogonal to being born yourself.
    - Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
      Some people want to make the world a better place by having families. To me this makes at least as much sense most plans for world-improvement.
      - coldtea 13y ago
        What about having families makes the world a better place? Plenty of abusive, criminal, ..., families. Matter of fact, every negative historical figure was also born into a family.

jakeogh 13y ago

"The human population is expected to grow by 2 or 3 billion by 2050" That is the UN's low estimate. The median UN human population projection estimates that we peak at 10 billion people around 2100. Chart at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe (I wont pretend wikipedia is a source, the chart could be completely wroing, I have not crunched the numbers at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/unpp/panel_population.htm myself) 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. There is an organization that argues the other side of Stallman's reasoning: http://overpopulationisamyth.com/category/categories/pop101 http://overpopulationisamyth.com/category/categories/pop101

maerF0x0 13y ago

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...

coldtea 13y ago
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...

dsowers 13y ago

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.

datapimp 13y ago
it is true. they're not. 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.
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lifeformed 13y ago

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.

gonvaled 13y ago
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.
zurn 13y ago
> 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.
- lifeformed 13y ago
  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.

busticket 13y ago

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.

busticket 13y ago

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flagnog 13y ago

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. Darwin would get a chuckle out of this.