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He is entitled to his own opinion. I am glad for the four children I have, who I expect will be net contributors to the well-being of humanity. AFTER EDIT: Th
by tokenadult 14y ago
He is entitled to his own opinion. I am glad for the four children I have, who I expect will be net contributors to the well-being of humanity.
AFTER EDIT:
The one reply to my comment here asks a pertinent question, which I hope I have given an adequate answer in a new reply. Meanwhile I will revise this comment to note that, as a subsequent comment has pointed out, there are already many countries in the world with negative population growth and a likely trend that the entire world will reach a peak population and then begin to have declining population while my children are middle-aged (and when I may, perhaps, still be alive). So, yes, RMS is certainly welcome not to have children if he is concerned about what bearing children might do to his family life or to the world as a whole, but I hope HN participants will be open to the possibility that some people choose to have children with their eyes open, knowing the trade-offs, and have a channel through having children to help you, me, and the whole world.
- gnosis 14y agoIf you want to have children so that they will help humanity (just about the only unselfish justification for having children), why not adopt instead?
- tokenadult 14y agoI was certainly willing to adopt children if I had no prospect of having biologically descended children. Having received my higher education at a world center of much research on adopted children and the influence of adoptive parents on those children, http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesota/dp/0674055462 http://www.amazon.com/Born-Together-Reared-Landmark-Minnesot... I have been aware that while adoptive parents can certainly do much to remove children from the deprivation of orphanages and the like, they sometimes can do less than they hope to influence the development of children not closely related to persons in their own family lineage. I commend anyone who chooses to adopt children, and I commend anyone who declines to have children, but I also commend anyone who has children and takes great care in bringing them up. New human beings with fresh ideas and well developed ability and inclination to contribute to human society are still a net benefit to humankind, whoever takes responsibility for bringing them up. My oldest son, the hacker, is already a self-sufficient adult, and I think he thinks deeply and seriously about how to be a benefit to the world as a whole. (The "world as a whole" means more to him than to many Americans because he has lived overseas when he was young.) My younger children appear to be on a similar track, and I had so many children precisely because I observed how my multicultural, "interracial" family seemed to be influencing each child from birth to the age when the next child was born.
- tshepang 14y agoWhy is "interracial" in quotes?
- tokenadult 14y agoWe are all part of the same human race. But it is a fact that my marriage to a woman from Taiwan would have been illegal in some states of the United States until the 1960s, when the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional silly state statutes that treated "races" as actual discrete categories. I'm proud to say that Minnesota never had such idiotic laws.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- zurn 14y ago> there are already many countries in the world with negative population growth and a likely trend that the entire world will reach a peak population This argument would be equally (in)valid for any tragedy of the commons type situation, like CO2 emissions or fisheries depletion etc.