Ask Lemmy

I'm a ML/AI engineer and student for context, if that makes my worldview and how I choose to tackle problems like this any more apparent. I'm quite busy with my work right now IRL due to the time of year. I don't really have a ton of time to write essays. So, I've selected six main excerpts from your response to highlight, in an attempt at getting my stance here across as efficiently as possible. I'm writing this pretty sleep deprived after an all-night session for work so apologies if I come across as brain-fried at any point.

I still don’t see that making a difference. There are so many bad parents cranking out children who grow up to be bad adults that it’s a losing battle either way.

A big problem for me here is the illicit nature of this sort of reasoning, and it pops up in a lot of your ethos. You start out by making some sort of statistical observation, such as the fact that there are so many bad parents, then use it to make a universal assertion... e.g, "it's a losing battle either way." You can either admit that what you actually mean is "very unlikely," and then make an argument based in expected values, or you can stop pretending you have demonstrated impossibility. If you accept the nonzero probability some people change things, the position that there is no difference collapses into incoherence, strictly & logically speaking.

If you see a car straight-on approaching the edge of a cliff at 90mph and accelerating, and it’s a hundred or so yards out, it isn’t exactly an act of prophecy to claim that it’s about to hurl itself off the edge.

This is problematic as a metaphor because physics as a system is highly deterministic compared to the high-variance nature of history. The past is full of unlikely reversals. This is where me calling your rhetoric faithful or dogmatic is kind of coming from. The claim to inevitability is being made as an act of faith and isn't actually justified in anything other than an assumption regarding the future based on imperfect data. That isn't a dig at you personally: we as humans, being finite systems, can obviously only hold so much in our brains and so we necessarily lack the information you'd need to make this judgement with any kind of certainty. So far you have just made the moral assertion that the future seems bleak and therefore having a child would be an unethical action. That's fine, but you can't pass it off as some sort of rational conclusion without providing some sort of argument based in actual scientific reasoning.

Real world strategy to reduce suffering? Well, you know my stance on that already: don’t choose to have kids.

That isn't really strategy, though. Collapsing into moralist abstention surrenders the strategic domain entirely. Strategy answers the question of "what interventions change outcomes?" Your default must be: could any action plausibly alter trajectories? You've refused that question by fiat. If abstention is your only strategy, state it is a moral choice, not a "real-world strategy."

I don’t see a rational basis for optimism. Frankly I’m a tad jealous of that optimism even if it is irrational…

You're mistaking emotional stance for epistemic method. What you're calling "optimism" isn't wishful thinking. It's a methodologically based refusal to collapse uncertainty into certainty, to keep probability distinct from necessity. I'm not optimistic. Bad things will happen in the future. Good things will too, though. Emotion doesn't really play into it as a factor for me. I work in a field that is playing with a Promethean fire capable of ending the human world as we know it, not dissimilar to the early days of nuclear physics and engineering. I'm aware every single day that through a variety of means the world might literally end, from our perspectives. It hasn't been written yet, though. I still plan for the future as if it is still coming because, while I cannot be certain what will happen, I can be certain that a number of things might happen. A cat who gets hit by a car dies by forces and confluence far beyond its own understanding, control, or conception of the world so we naturally wouldn't judge it for not knowing traffic laws. If humanity dies, so be it, but don't condemn us to immorality for the mere possibility that we were in ignorance of tools that might've been our salvation. It isn't wrong to try to survive, from any perspective. I digress however, I'm getting into a bit of a tangent here.

That aside, again I’m not really sure what you mean. I understand sanctity to mean holding religious value, or holy. I don’t personally believe in any of that, but that isn’t exclusive to morality or values - there is absolutely a framework.

Well, that's essentially the admission I'm looking for. You cannot have it both ways. Either you can deny that your view depends on values (religious ["sanctity"], secular, wherever you want to source them) - in which case you have no moral basis to prescribe abstention - or you admit that you are making a weighty value judgement about what lives are worth creating; engaging in a grand moral calculus with only a handful of anecdotal, recent, and localized points as input. I find that irrational in essence. It doesn't matter whether you're getting it from religion or not, it's still logically a faith-based conclusion until you back it up with some sort of actual reasoning or evidence.

Genuinely good people are a minority; and genuinely good people in power are a unicorn.

So, there’s the grounds for my conclusion. Evil is the norm.

You're substituting anecdote and grievance for argument, in short. These are sweeping empirical claims being declared as metaphysical law. That's fine if and only if you have robust and falsifiable metrics proving that humanity will inexorably degrade regardless of intervention. If that's the case, then present such evidence. Otherwise you're arguing against the very standard academic opinion in history and historiography, which is that minorities can and do still change history; denying that requires extraordinary proof that you haven't offered. Historically, small organized minorities have produced outsized change and you need to justify it rigorously if you want to argue against the mere possibility.

From my point of view, your position has three untenable and incompatible moves happening at once:

1. Appeal to evidence and realism &&
2. Assert inevitability and total futility &&
3. Claim your position isn't a values-based judgement

These can't all be true at once, you can't coherently string these together. You have to pick one. You could oppose reproduction on principled and moral grounds. It's not some rational or scientific take, but, if you concede that then you can at least own it and declare it as your personal moral policy. Or, you could approach it in a probabilistic manner - like I make initial attempts at in my responses to you. You would claim that given so and so probabilities and expected values, abstention has the best expected outcomes. If you want to claim that, again, it's fine, but the proof is in the pudding so to speak. You can't just wantonly come to conclusions based on vibes, anecdote, or faith - it needs justification beyond that... especially when we are talking about something as serious this. I suppose you could also just outright accept futility as some sort of a fatalist too, just declare the bad outcomes as inevitable. At that point, though, there's no point in you even being here arguing with me or anyone else because you're not arguing a position in the debate, you're renouncing the forum of discourse entirely. The fact that you're still here tells me that, maybe even if deep down, that final part isn't truly what you think even though what you've responded with would, on the face of it, make me say otherwise.

I need to wrap this up because I really need to get back to studying for both work and school (the problems I am working on require me to read a few new books) but I'll leave you with this final tidbit, at least for now:

If you're truly jealous of my "optimism" and really want it for yourself, then I have good news. I can actually give it to you. You don't need to trust me or agree with me at all, just consider the following advice, if you want to take anything from our interaction at all.

Anytime you catch yourself saying something absolutist like "it's inevitable," "it makes no difference," etc. - try three quick rhetorical checks:

1. Are there counterfactual statements?: What specific intervention would falsify your claim?
2. Probability: Are you claiming zero probability or very low probability? Be numeric if you can.
3. Value disclosure: Is this conclusion driven by empirical expectation or by moral preference? Label it and throw it into one of these two bins.

If you run those three and answer honestly then your sentences will stop migrating into prophecy. You will feel a lot less burdened without conceding your rationalism.