Is Pronatalist.org the only EA group advocating for increased birth rates? Additionally, does anyone know if 'Stop Population Decline' has any affiliation with EA?
How can we build more (and better) groups?
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Pronatalist.org is not an EA group. It's great that EA considerations have started entering the public consciousness and I would love if every charity was expected to answer "why is this the most effective thing you could be doing?", but that doesn't mean that any group claiming their mission is really important is part of EA. It's very difficult to argue a rigorous case that promoting pronatalist sentiment is an effective use of money or time, and so far they haven't.
Rather than ask how we can build more (and better) groups, ask whether we should.
Would you be able to cite any strong reasoning for this as an important cause area. Past research into this suggests not.
Some key reasons I find the issue uncompelling :
- It's very likely a sociological phenomena, and so behaviour change could occur if/when time occurs
- It will play out over an extremely long time - unless you considering more near term economic effects
- It seems closesly related to current (and likely to change) paradigms of labour and child rearing
- It's sorta like worrying about horse-manure disposal right before the invention of the car
- It's sorta like worrying about horse-manure disposal right before the invention of the car
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ElliotJDavies
7moBroadly speaking, there's 2 categories of explanations for depopulation: sociological (e.g. richer people want less kids) and biological (e.g. sperm counts are declining).
Because the conversation around depopulation is very emotive, which doesn't bring out the best epistemics in people. It's worth pointing out that the cause is almost certainly sociological.
Said another way, I think some actors refer to depopulation as a "fertility crisis" and this is misleading, and aspecially unhelpful when trying to derive solutions and forecasts.
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burner
7moThis misunderstands the fertility problem. Most fertility advocates focus on the fertility gap - the gap between how many children people want to have and actually have (which is fewer than they want). It's also not that richer people (within countries) want to have less kids. We're seeing U shaped fertiliy trends, where the rich have more children than the middle class.
This implies it is not a "sociological phenomenon" (except in a trivial sense) and is instead a complex mix of social, cultural and economic factors that we do not yet totally understand.
It's extremely dubious whether these are a factor at all. See Ritchie here, for example.
But the crux of of my disagreement was your phrasing:
I'm still not sure what that means, but if your general point is that we can't influence behavioral changes through interventions (economic, education, etc) that is obviously incorrect.
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ElliotJDavies
7moMy claim is (1) The topic is often sensationalised by many who talk about it (2) some of these people, infer that it could result in humanity going extinct. (3) If it's a sociological phenomenon, it's substantially less likely to result in x-risk, because presumably when faced with extinction, future humans would be willing to have more children.
All of these fit squarely under a broad term like "sociological factors".
To be clear, my point wasn't that fertility advocates are correct to point towards this category of explanations, but that they often do, and they're wrong in doing so.
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burner
7moMany things are sensationalized. This is not good evidence for or against fertility being a problem. Many accuse AIXR of being sensationalized.
I do not think smart fertility advocates believe that populations would slowly dwindle until there was one person left. Obviously that is a silly model. The serious model, described in Ch. 7 of What We Owe the Future, is that economic growth will slow to a crawl, and the time of perils will be extended. You can also see this model in Aschenbrenner 2020.
This is why I think "sociological phenomenon" is confusing more than it is enlightening here. Humans make fertility decisions - based on a wide variety of factors which we do not fully understand - and those decisions matter long before we are on the verge of extinction from depopulation. We do have a number of handles to influence these decisions, should we choose to use them.
Ultimately, I do not believe fertility is a risk because AI will accelerate economic growth even as populations decline, but it is frustrating to see people fail to appreciate the key factors here in their model, and instead dismiss the issue as sensationalized.
Chapter 7 of What We Owe the Future has some discussion along these lines. I hope that most EAs are not prioritizing this issue not because it's not important, but because short to medium AI timelines present a more urgent problem.
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The founders did write a detailed (and poorly received) post arguing for considering demographic collapse as a high-priority cause area.