Thank you for writing this.

After I first read all the material on Cold Takes (well, I skimmed it--but only because you asked me to!) I figured that I wouldn't bother to keep up with new stuff as it comes out; what good would it do me? It was written for a general audience and I am not a general audience.

That attitude lasted until around the third time I found myself linking to or quoting from your blog as a starting point for conversations with the vastly inferentially removed. And, I've known about the blog less than a week.

Needless to say I'll be keeping up with what you write.

Thank you for linking me to Kelsey Piper--I haven't read Chris Olah's essay yet, but I'm sure I'd've thanked you for linking him too had I only. I'm going to give Focusmate a go; I've been meaning to set it up but procrastinated doing so long enough to generate an ugh field about that. Thank you for that, too.

Thank you for the recommendation, I'll check it out.

I've had a tab on my browser open to a page of therapists who take my parent's insurance for . . . semesters, now. Thank you for giving me the impetus to email a couple of them. I'll let you know how it goes. :)

Thank you for the response. I've given checklists a try in the past and found them useful then; my problem has been that I don't remember/think to draw up new ones. The obvious solution to that is obvious, so I set a repeating alarm on my phone to remind me. Whenever it goes off I'll draw up a to-do list for the day, even a short one.

If I hadn't had to explain why it was to-do lists hadn't worked for me in the past, I wouldn't have thought of the obvious solution (though, time will tell how well it works--I only just now set the alarm), so many thanks for replying to me and writing up such a long and thoughtful list of things which worked for you.

"Regarding your aside, I think that illustrates an interesting potential solution to the dilemma (?) The purpose is not to save lives (because in your case, the world where 100% of people die is less or equally bad than 50% of people dying). This is an interesting case, and perhaps there's a way to rephrase the original claim to accommodate it, though I'm not certain how."

I must have inadequately written my parenthetical aside; perhaps I inadequately wrote everything. 

The purpose is entirely to save lives. We have a world with seven billion people. If all of them died, it amount of disutility in my view would be X times seven billion, where X is the disutility from someone dying. If the world instead had fourteen billion people and seven billion of them died, the disutility would still be X times seven billion. The human race existing doesn't matter to me, only the humans. If no one had any kids and this generation was the last one, I don't think that would be a bad thing.

This isn't something which all EAs think (some of them value "humanity" as well as the humans), though it does seem to be a view over represented by people who responded to this thread.

"The way I see it, the people of the future 'existing' is a knob that we have the power to control (in a broad sense). It's not something that would happen 'either way.'"

I know a man who plans to have a child the traditional way. We've spoken about the topic and I've told him my views; there's not terribly much more I could do. I have very little power over whether or not that child will exist--none whatsoever, in any practical way.

That child doesn't exist yet--there's some chance they never will. I want that child to have a happy life, and to not die unless they want to. When that entity becomes existent, the odds are very good I'll be personally involved in said entity's happiness; I'll be a friend of the family. Certainly, if twelve years in the child fell in a river and started to drown, I'd muddy my jacket to save them.

But I wouldn't lift a finger to create them. Do I explain myself? 

Something analogous could be said about all the humans who do not exist, but will. We have control over the "existence knob" in such a broad sense that there's little point bringing it up at all. So, living in a world where people exist, and will continue to do so, it seems like the most important thing is to keep them alive.

Valuing the people who exist is a very different thing from valuing people existing. EA is not just about population growth--it isn't about population growth at all.

There must be something I don't understand; I don't see a puzzle here at all. You spent a lot of time writing this up, presumably you spent a lot of time thinking about it, so I'm going to spend at least a small amount of time trying to find where our worldviews glide past each other.

Here's my take. It's  a fairly simple take, as I'm a fairly simple person. 

If someone exists, one ought to be nice to them. Certainly, one ought not to let them die--to do so would be unkind, to say the least. People who exist should have good lives--if someone doesn't have a good life or will lose their good life, this is a problem one ought to fix. So far, nothing but bog-standard moral fare. 

If someone doesn't exist, they don't exist--it's impossible to be kind or cruel to someone who doesn't exist. I don't think many would disagree on that point either. 

Now here, perhaps, is where we lose each other: if someone is going to exist, and one is aware of this fact, one should probably take preemptive steps to ensure that future person will have a good life--a life happy, fulfilling, and long. This isn't because hypothetical people have moral value, it's because we are aware in advance that the problem won't always be a hypothetical one. We can realistically foresee that unless we course correct on this destroying the biosphere project we've undertaken, people will come into existence and lead terrible, cruelly short lives.

I (and many others, I gather) aren't doing this so that more people will be born--we're doing this so that people who will be born either way live happily.

(Parenthetical aside: some people place value on the human species continuing to exist--I don't, personally; if everyone alive died that would be awful, but I don't think it'd be more awful than if there had been fourteen billion minds before seven billion died. That said, if we care at all about aesthetics I can see the aesthetic argument in favor of human survival, in that all aesthetics would die with us.)

This is a very different problem from educating women and predictably causing fewer people to exist in the first place. My value isn't people existing, my value is good long lives for those who do (or will).

• Suppose, towards a contradiction, that the goal of life is to save lives.
• We know educating women more is good and would be done in an ideal world.
• Increasing women's education leads to fewer lives because of declining fertility.
• Therefore, the goal of life must not be to save lives.

What if one's goal is to save lives which already exist, contingent on their already existing? 

Pure utilitarianism doesn't necessarily lead to screwy answers when thinking about the future--for instance, suppose that matter is convertible to computronium, and computronium is convertible to hedonium, and that there is thus a set amount of joy in the universe; in that instance, creating more people just trades against the happiness of those who already exist, who could have used all that matter for themselves, but are now morally obligated to share.

But I tend to be of the view that potential people don't exist and thus don't have moral significance. If it's foreseeable that someone in particular will exist (and at that point have moral significance) we ought to make sure things go well for them. But I don't feel any moral obligation to bring them into existence.

This is crossposted from the December career advice thread:

I notice that the thread has gotten long and a lot of people's questions are being buried (one thing I intensely dislike about upvote-style forums is that it isn't trivial to scroll down to the end of the thread and see what's new ("Oh, but you can sort by new if you want to," one replies, and, sure, I guess, but unless everyone else with good opinions does too that doesn't exactly solve the problem, now does it?)). The buried questions don't seem less important than the ones posted first, and I wish I was competent to give expert advice apropos them/had a way to direct the community's gaze to them.

I have a question of my own--regarding changing my undergraduate major--but I'll wait for the January thread to ask it.

I notice that the thread has gotten long and a lot of people's questions are being buried (one thing I intensely dislike about upvote-style forums is that it isn't trivial to scroll down to the end of the thread and see what's new ("Oh, but you can sort by new if you want to," one replies, and, sure, I guess, but unless everyone else with good opinions does too that doesn't exactly solve the problem, now does it?)). The buried questions don't seem less important than the ones posted first, and I wish I was competent to give expert advice apropos them/had a way to direct the community's gaze to them.

I have a question of my own--regarding changing my undergraduate major--but I'll wait for the January thread to ask it.