Lots of young EAs are struggling with the issue of whether, when, where, and how to have kids, and whether becoming a parent will undermine being an Effective Altruist, in terms of opportunities costs such as career, time, energy, money, focus, and values.
For whatever it's worth, I'm happy to answer any questions you might have about parenting -- its pros and cons, ethics, practicalities, etc.
Background: I'm a 57-year-old dad; I've raised a 26-year-old daughter and a 6-month-old baby. I've also helped raise a teenage step-son, and I come from a big, close-knit family (I have about 30 cousins.) I've lived as a parent in the US (mostly), UK, and Australia. I'm also a psychology professor who's taught courses on parenting-relevant topics such as behavior genetics, educational psychology, evolutionary psychology, human intelligence, evolutionary game theory, and decision making. I've been involved in EA for the last 6 years, and I have a pronatalist orientation, with an interest in population ethics, reproductive bioethics, gamete donation, and cognitive and moral enhancement. I'm not an expert on every practical or scientific issue about parenting, but maybe my perspective could be useful to some EAs.
Kat - thanks very much for this detailed and helpful comment.
I think you exemplify the kind of decision strategy I'm urging EAs to use in figuring out whether to have kids: treat it as a serious, high-stakes research project, gather a lot of diverse data, insights, and experiences, consider the fit to one's own life-goals and personality traits, consult with others who have done it (and not done it), consider best-case, worst-case, and likely median outcomes, etc.
Often, the answer will be 'I should have kids', but often the answer will be 'nope'.
Also thanks for linking to your full post, and to Jeff Kaufman's reply, which I largely agree with his comments, which I'll expand upon here. IMHO, three big ways that 'babysitting as a parenting trial' doesn't quite work are that
(1) it feels qualitatively different to care for one's own biological children than other people's kids, partly because your own kids will be more genetically and phenotypically similar to you (not just in appearance, but in personality and cognitive traits, quirks, preferences, values, etc) than unrelated kids are, partly because your kids will also resemble whatever lover/spouse/partner you scrambled your genes with, and partly because the process of becoming a parent (being pregnant, giving birth, bonding with baby) activates a whole suite of evolved adaptations for parenting that depend on complex hormonal, epigenetic, and maturation pathways that basically rewire one's brain from non-parent mode into parent mode.
(2) babysitters don't have nearly as much authority and autonomy as parents in determining a kid's daily routine, schedule, feeding, clothing, discipline strategies, training strategies, household setup, etc., so parenting offers much broader scope for deciding over the longer term how to arrange one's life to optimize child care
(3) child care has a difficult and frustrating learning curve, so the first few hours (of first few hundreds of hours) of child care as a beginner aren't representative of how one can do child care as an expert (which most parents become by the time their kids are toddlers). Think of all the things you hated at first as a newbie, but learned to love. For example, the first two days of learning to ski or snowboard absolutely suck. You fall over a lot, it's awkward and scary, your muscles get exhausted, you get cold and wet, you can't pay attention to anything fun or scenic about the experience. But then skiing gets awesome from about days three onwards, and you suddenly understand why so many people enjoy it. Same with the first few experiences of public speaking, or the first few dates, or dances, or posts on EA Forum. It can be quite hard to predict how expert-level performance will feel from a few hours of beginner-level experience. (Not that this applies to Kat, who has a lot of babysitting experience; it's more of a cautionary point for EAs who think 'I'll just try babysitting my niece for a couple of hours are use that experience to update my probability of having kids.')
Another factor I haven't mentioned elsewhere is the issue of giving one's parents grandkids. I grew up in a very pronatalist family; my grandparents had 12 kids, and I have 30 cousins. I always felt a very strong traditionalist, almost deontological imperative to give my own parents grand-kids that they could enjoy, and not to let their bloodline die out with me. I figured, they'd made huge sacrifices to raise me, and I had a moral duty to them to have some kids of my own.
That might sound weird to some EAs, but think of it an analogous to an AI alignment problem. My parents invested a lot in creating and training me as a little AGI, partly (from an evolutionary perspective) so that I could create and train my own little AGIs in turn. They tried to train me as a good future parent, who had pronatalist values. If I'd decided not to have kids, that would represent a catastrophic alignment failure, from their point of view. And I felt, as a good AGI who felt some moral obligation to my creators, that I shouldn't just drift away from their values -- including the crucial value of becoming grandparents. Of course, in modern societies there's often a strong taboo against parents of adult kids putting much pressure on their kids to produce grandkids. But very few parents of adult kids will be delighted if their kids say 'Sorry, mom and dad, maximizing total future sentient utility in the cosmic light-cone is more important to me than continuing your bloodlines or letting you ever enjoy playing with grandkids'.
This doesn't mean that one's parents reproductive priorities should always over-ride one's own rational goals. But it does suggest that talking with one's parents (and siblings, and other family stakeholders) might be wise in deciding about the issue of having kids. Some parents might truly not care about grandkids (although this is probably quite rare); some might care a lot, and might suffer bitter, permanent disappointment if they don't get grandkids. This is just something that's worth weighing, in terms of aggregate family utility rather than one's individual utility.