Skepsis #48: The calculus of parenting
Parenting, math, artificial intelligence, world-ending comets and Meat Loaf!
Parenting as a Public Good
Because we live in a biological and cultural world where one sex (women) bears a disproportionate cost for childrearing, it is no surprise that they do less of it when given the choice to have children or not - as they now do in most "modern" countries. This is why we’ve seen declining birth rates and subsequently aging populations in industrialized countries which poses further challenges to their economic growth and future political stability. Increased immigration has been the go-to solution for decades, but is not a long-term viable solution more countries today are catching up and seeing their own birth rates decline.
As a result, many governments have understood that parenting is essentially a public good and want people to have more kids. Having kids, however, is a costly endeavor for parents. Economically speaking, childrearing is free labor by the parents (mothers in particular) that isn't well compensated for by society - which accrues a lot of the benefits long term. Back in the good old days, you could at least put your kids to work at the farm!
So the argument, then, is that it behooves the state to support parenting and childrearing much more if it wants people to have more kids. It's a matter of properly compensating parents/mothers for their economic and personal "sacrifice" in favor of society at large. If not, we can't expect people to want to have more kids - and you really should want to have kids, climate change notwithstanding.
We aren’t accustomed to thinking about fertility as a public good in this way, because it has always been one that women have had to provide for free. The current approach seems to be stuck in the same mindset: though we fret about crashing birth rates, we continue to act as though having children is a personal luxury, offering only crumbs of support. But producing children and raising them has always been work. It’s time that work is given the recognition it’s due.
As an aside, it is conceivable that artificial wombs will be quite mainstream within a few decades.
Why don't we use the math we learn in school?
Anecdotally, it often feels like we rarely use any of the math we learn in school, and research bears this out. But it's not so much that math (and perhaps more advanced math in particular) is never useful in real life, rather it's that people don't know how or when to apply what they learned. Instead, we muddle through; rather than multiplying fractions in our head, we make use of visual cues and guesstimates to approximate the right answer to everyday problems. And the thing is that it often works quite well, so we don't bother learning or using "real math".
"In one frequently cited episode, an individual was trying to calculate 2/3rds of 3/4 cups of cottage cheese. Instead of applying learned math (multiplying fractions would give the easily-measurable answer of 1/2 cup), the person scooped out 2/3rds of a cup, made a rough circle on the table, and cut out a quarter."
AI is getting very impressive
Back in 2020, I wrote about GPT-3, the smart text-generating AI. It was a pretty big thing in the AI world, and things haven't stopped progressing since then. Today, AI can not just generate fully readable and logical articles, it can create beautiful pieces of art, music, photorealistic pictures of people that don't exist, and soon probably full videos. Nevertheless, it's not perfect tech today and there's still a long way to go until we'll see broadly useful applications of much of this tech without any human direction or intervention.
Here's a piece of art I "created" by typing in the words "Moon fox and friends", into an AI that uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate the following picture:
“I for one, welcome our robot overlords.”
Don't Look Up - Not that clever
Don't Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence among others is an entertaining and very well-made film. A mix of satire, drama, and comedy. It is also an overly pronounced metaphor for our inability to deal with climate change as a society. The problem with this metaphor, however, is that the challenges associated with stopping a world-ending comet compared to the slow, vague, and amorphous threat of climate change are very different. Something the film fails to capture. Worth seeing though!
The threat of large objects from space hitting earth and causing a lot of damage or an extinction-level event is however very real, and something we should take seriously. The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program, but fortunately, we do.
Meat Loaf - I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)
A long time ago when I was a young kid, this was my absolute favorite music video on MTV. RIP Meat Loaf!
The limits of pleasure with Paul Bloom
Something many people realize the older they get is the role that suffering and struggle play in living a meaningful and good life. Doing hard things and going through "pain" is paradoxically what gives us the most pleasure in the end.
"In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. They discuss the limitations of hedonism, the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Daniel Kahneman on well-being, integrating the experiencing and remembering selves, moral motivations, the effects of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry of loss and gain, Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment, effective altruism, valuing the future more than the past, the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology, and other topics."
Discussed in this episode is also the dichotomy of the experiencing self and the remembering self, which I wrote about in a previous edition of Skepsis.
As always, stay safe out there.
/Phil