"What if baby product companies created pronatalist advertising to ensure a stream of future customers?" wonders Elaine Ou. https://elaineou.com/2018/09/13/the-first-hit-is-free/ …pic.twitter.com/rklbh09gVX
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This is unbearably cruel to a whole lot of people, including many who are blameless even under the premises behind the idea. But I think the underlying premise is awfully condescending, oblivious, and misguided, too. Don't do this.
Unbearably cruel is an accurate description of the rules of an evolutionary universe. So it will often apply to true statements. The underlying premise is "Survive". I think its utterly nuts that this is controversial. Fortunately, it's a problem that fixes itself.
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One of the lovely things about being human is that we can use our self-awareness and intelligence to make decisions more sophisticated than base animal imperatives. Compassion, for example, is a factor that we can consider, and should. ("Survive" is not remotely at risk today.)
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Intelligence lets us understand complex things like the effect of statistically selection for or against certain human attributes. Like game theory and evolution. Like economics and public goods and utility. Using all that brainpower to justify extinguishing yourself...
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1) I believe that it's plausible that mainstream Western culture's advantage in memetic propagation is enough to more than compensate for its lower birth rate, and 2) I find the premise of your argument dehumanizing: animal behavior is transformed by intelligence and culture.
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Also, I feel a disturbing undercurrent of tribal hostility or even warfare beneath the whole conceptual foundation of your argument. The 20th century showed us that that is a path of darkness. Let us instead celebrate our shared humanity and seek the future together.
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Even if we set aside the selective effects of low birth rates, they represent an existential threat to the human race. As the entire world progresses, its birthrates will plummet, as they have in almost every country that gets wealth, gender equality, etc.
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Nonsense. It's simply not meaningful to extrapolate trends of birth rates in today's context (with 7 billion humans) to how people would behave if populations were actually low enough for extinction to be a concern. It's an almost unimaginably different situation.
End of conversation
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