"EAs" refers to effective altruists. "EV" refers to expected value; this is the mathematical formula for dealing with risk.

1. Should EAs have kids?
Or
“Shut Up, Go Forth and Multiply!”

2. Objections
 Having kids is intrinsically harmful
 Kids may not adopt EA principles
 The median smart kid contributes little
 It is more important to act now

3. Is having kids intrinsically bad?
 Even if you take the view that creating a new person is
intrinsically harmful, kids often have extrinsic benefits
 One example of an extrinsic benefit would be if your
kids became EAs and did a lot of good
 Even antinatalists should probably have 1 kid to
prevent 5 kids from being born

4. What factors select against EA
values?
 Weirdness
 Lack of prestige
 Irrationality on certain views or utility functions

5. Will your kids adopt EA principles?
 Certain weird beliefs have a reasonably high intergenerational retention rate e.g. cryonics has a retention rate of 50%, according to an Alcor employee
 Intelligence is probably 50% genetically determined; the other 50% is not due to shared environment, so could be genetic noise
 Current best guess is that altruism is 30-50% heritable, though this is much harder to study because you need to distinguish ideally altruistic tendencies from low-effort
“virtue signalling”
 Conscientiousness and extraversion are 40-50% heritable

6. Sam Bankman-Fried
 SBF is the founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has a net
worth of about 26.5 billion at age 29
 His parents are EA-adjacent; his mother has published a book on
utilitarianism
 EA collectively spent 263 million in 2020, which is approximately
1/100 of SBF’s net worth

7. Median < Average
 More intelligence + altruism could be exponentially better, even if the median is significantly lower than the
average
 1 Newton raises the average EV of equivalently intelligent scientists who did not achieve as much as he did
 1 Sam Bankman Fried or John Stuart Mill raises the average EV of the children of utilitarians who did not
achieve as much good as they did

8. Short AI Timelines
 How certain are you?
 How much can you do personally to help FAI development?
 To what degree will a child hinder your ability to help? Can you
mitigate that in any way?
 How much good could your child do, if AGI timelines are longer
than your best guess?


9. Best ways to have kids?
 Ideally avoid procreating with your husband or wife, since you have probably selected him or her partly on the basis of chemistry and sex appeal rather than napkin math
 Get Nobel laureate or successful entrepreneur/CEO/EA-extraordinaire sperm and egg donors (both?)
 Ask Sam Bankman Fried for his sperm (seriously)
 Use iterated embryo selection and other emerging reproductive technologies to select for high IQ
 Have 6+ kids
 Make sure they have good nutrition in the womb & growing up
 Teach them about EA & take their education seriously (e.g. if you have the means, consider tutors rather than school)