This is a continuation of some thing that came up in Open Problems in Utilitarianism, I'm posting it here as to keep that thread on subject.

This thread is about how utilitarians should be addressing over population. First I'll post my reply to the last 2 post in the other thread and then the backing info of how this started.

DanielLC wrote:Not necessarily. When you sell sperm, it lowers the market price of sperm, making it so more people will buy and fewer will sell.

True but I think this is for the most part negligible. I don't think 100ish dollars is going to be the deciding factor of people making this choice.

The thing is that raising kids takes time, and if your goal is to grow the number of utilitarians it might be (and probably would be) more efficient to spend the time convincing people to become utilitarians than changing a baby's diaper.

Agreed, but I'm the type of person that looks for the very long run. In the short run it would defiantly be more efficient, but in the long run we would be running a large risk. I know a few people that would logically agree with utilitarianism but don't feel the motivation to act on it (I am, to a certain degree one of them). To me this means humans are not attracted to it genetically.

People are greedy and lazy (not to mention often stupid) even if they understand and agree with utilitarianism they might not act on it. I don't think education can fix people being unmotivated to do what's right, only inform them of what is.

Plus, as DanielLC pointed out sperm donation seems to address both problems.

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Nap wrote:If any thing its the opposite. We have a moral obligation to not overpopulate the planet so that others can be happier. If humanity wasn't approaching the double digit billions maybe, but the way things are now no.

I've made the personal choice that I will not have children of my own, instead I will adopt. I think that overpopulation is the biggest thing preventing happiness and causing pain, it should be one of the biggest issues to utilitarians.

Nap wrote:As for if utilitarians should not have kids, that's a very tricky subject that would need its own thread. On the one hand overpopulation is a massive problem, on the other if utilitarians stop having kids there will be less genetic material attracted to utilitarianism, and with less utilitarians there in theory will be less good in the world.

Hedonic Treader wrote:

Nap wrote:On the one hand overpopulation is a massive problem, on the other if utilitarians stop having kids there will be less genetic material attracted to utilitarianism, and with less utilitarians there in theory will be less good in the world.

Utilitarianism reproduces memetically, not genetically. There is no utilitarianism gene. If there are personality traits that correlate with acceptance of utilitarianism, and genes that correlate with those personality traits, the total correlation between genes and acceptance of utilitarianism may exist, but be very weak. You can of course pass on memes to your biological or adopted children's brains, but you cannot control that they stay dominant there once they become powerful adults. You would do more good to hand an attractive utilitarianism pamphlet out to many existing adolescents.

Nap wrote:

Hedonic Treader wrote:Utilitarianism reproduces memetically, not genetically. There is no utilitarianism gene. If there are personality traits that correlate with acceptance of utilitarianism, and genes that correlate with those personality traits, the total correlation between genes and acceptance of utilitarianism may exist, but be very weak. You can of course pass on memes to your biological or adopted children's brains, but you cannot control that they stay dominant there once they become powerful adults. You would do more good to hand an attractive utilitarianism pamphlet out to many existing adolescents.

If all utilitarians stopped having kids I think over time the likely-hood of more utilitarians emerging would have to go down. There would be one driving force for this natural selection and that is that utilitarians don't have kids. Without any or at least very little overlap into other traits, by that I mean the only thing determining if some one had kids or not is if they are utilitarian, I think this is much too strong of a mechanistic to be ignored for long.

We can buy ourselves some time though, because the larger a population is with frequent gene trading the harder it is for natural selection to affect the population, thus this evolution away from utilitarianism would take longer.

We have a population of over 7 billion and there are no natural borders we can't frequently cross to isolate groups of population. This means any natural selection affecting us would take considerable time to kick-in.

It's like adding yellow pain to blue paint. If there is a drop of yellow added at a time to a drop of blue, it turns to green after just 1 drop, and to green yellow after just 2. But if you are adding 1 drop of yellow paint to 7 billion drops of blue it might take a while.

DanielLC wrote:I suspect that if you donate your sperm, and then use the money to pay some charity that distributes condoms in Africa, you'd end up decreasing overpopulation on the net.

Nap wrote:

DanielLC wrote:I suspect that if you donate your sperm, and then use the money to pay some charity that distributes condoms in Africa, you'd end up decreasing overpopulation on the net.

Ya. I like this idea.

You're not really contributing to population because the woman wanting the sperm would be making the decision to have a child with or without your involvement, you'd be helping to decrease the population with donations, and you wouldn't be taking away utilitarian attracted DNA from the population (maybe not take away as much at least or maybe even contributing more).

DanielLC wrote:

You're not really contributing to population because the woman wanting the sperm would be making the decision to have a child with or without your involvement

Not necessarily. When you sell sperm, it lowers the market price of sperm, making it so more people will buy and fewer will sell. The total increase in children born will be PED/(PED-PES) times the number of children you sell enough sperm to make, where PED is price elasticity of demand, and PES is price elasticity of supply. Note that PED is normally negative, so it's |PED|/(|PED|+PES). This is similar to the effect eating meat has on the amount of animals killed, which comes out to -PES/(PED-PES) times the amount you refrain from eating, or PES/(|PED|+PES).

I have no idea what values PES or PED have in this case, so I can't really tell you much beyond that it comes out to somewhere between zero and one.

Hutch wrote:

Nap wrote:

Hedonic Treader wrote:Utilitarianism reproduces memetically, not genetically. There is no utilitarianism gene. If there are personality traits that correlate with acceptance of utilitarianism, and genes that correlate with those personality traits, the total correlation between genes and acceptance of utilitarianism may exist, but be very weak. You can of course pass on memes to your biological or adopted children's brains, but you cannot control that they stay dominant there once they become powerful adults. You would do more good to hand an attractive utilitarianism pamphlet out to many existing adolescents.

If all utilitarians stopped having kids I think over time the likely-hood of more utilitarians emerging would have to go down. There would be one driving force for this natural selection and that is that utilitarians don't have kids. Without any or at least very little overlap into other traits, by that I mean the only thing determining if some one had kids or not is if they are utilitarian, I think this is much too strong of a mechanistic to be ignored for long.

We can buy ourselves some time though, because the larger a population is with frequent gene trading the harder it is for natural selection to affect the population, thus this evolution away from utilitarianism would take longer.

We have a population of over 7 billion and there are no natural borders we can't frequently cross to isolate groups of population. This means any natural selection affecting us would take considerable time to kick-in.

It's like adding yellow pain to blue paint. If there is a drop of yellow added at a time to a drop of blue, it turns to green after just 1 drop, and to green yellow after just 2. But if you are adding 1 drop of yellow paint to 7 billion drops of blue it might take a while.

The thing is that raising kids takes time, and if your goal is to grow the number of utilitarians it might be (and probably would be) more efficient to spend the time convincing people to become utilitarians than changing a baby's diaper.

Sorry I didn't have the time to read what you posted, but wanted to share what I think is a very relevant and an important discussion by Toby Ord: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/128
You can download the mp3 there

I just finished listening to that (by coincidence), and I still find it one of Toby’s least convincing arguments, on various grounds:

1) he should just drop the whole angle about digital luxuries. The hedonic treadmill being what it is, 7 billion people having another song to listen to might not actually increase net utility, even if that song is ‘better’ (ie seeming more enjoyable) than any of the alternatives they might have listened to otherwise.
1a) there are already orders of magnitude more digital luxuries than anyone could consume in a lifetime and if there is a hedonic-treadmill-beating effect from making even better ones, there’s a negative effect from making worse ones, and possibly even of making well above average ones, since all distract from the top-tier ones you’d do best by consuming and the more there are, the more they complicate the sorting algorithms you might use to find the ones that you would have done better by listening to.

2) a new person is an opportunity cost. Their existence reduces the resources we can put into eg education, welfare, behavioural enhancement of the smaller subset of people who would have existed otherwise. Toby himself eats meat, despite advocating vegetarianism in that talk as a way of solving the population problem, on the grounds that he thinks it makes him function better enough to outweigh the costs. Granted that he might hold the view that improvements to his efficiency are worth much more than improvements to the average person’s efficiency, it’s still an incongruity in his argument that he doesn’t address.

3) he talks too much in terms of possibility rather than probability. The question is not what could happen if 7 billion people started cooperating more effectively, but what we expect to happen if they cooperate to within expected parameters.

4) he just assumes net positivity of the average human life. I’m not sure there’s any reason to do so (again because of the hedonic treadmill, we might expect the average to be close to 0. Certainly his social experience in one of the two most elite universities in the UK will give him an extremely skewed anecdotal data set from which to draw his intuitions)

5) he doesn’t address timing much. As technological efficiency improves, people will do better with fewer resources, which, all things being equal, would mean that even if one accepts the rest of the argument, you’d rather have people living and consuming the richest resources later rather than now. All things are certainly not equal, and there’s obviously a large potential benefit to getting technological improvement sooner rather than later even if it means ‘wasting’ resources do do so – but it’s obviously a very complicated issue which again he doesn’t really engage with.

6) I think he has a strong technoptimistic bias, as seen in his choice of example in the Population Pomb. Yes, one person made one famously wrong pessimistic prediction, but that’s basically an outlying event in the history of futurism. You only have to flick through the archives of New Scientist, the BBC show Tomorrow’s World, and the whole genre of science fiction to see that the normal trend is that technological progress, especially major breakthroughs, happens slower than we think it’s going to. Toby knows all of this well, but given that one property of cognitive biases is that knowing of them doesn’t actually help you combat them and that he offers neither a defence of his own bias nor a balanced overview of the prospects of futurological thinking, I’m inclined towards scepticism.

Another factor is that almost all the major leaps forward in science and technology on which futurists like to draw happened in a world with effectively infinite resources. Yes, new technologies can switch reliances, but since the start of the industrial revolution we’ve never really run out of a resource in the ways in which we’re likely to in the 21st century, nor experienced any phenomenon to compare with the externality of global climate change. We have in effect gained all our prosperity from a loan of resources. Perhaps ventures into space etc will allow us to effectively pay this back, but simply optimising technological efficiency isn’t going to stop the fundamental difference between the potential for progress in a world with plentiful oil, freshwater, arable land, fish stocks, wood, coal, metals, fertiliser etc and a world where these things suddenly hit a hard(ish) limit.