> I don’t believe in lying to children, so I said, “we could buy a car. But instead, before you were born, your daddy and your Lindsey and I all made a promise
OK, first, this isn't criticism, it's "here's another way I might have handled this, maybe it would work here, maybe it wouldn't, you're the person with the most info."
But personally, as a parent, I'm not sure if I would have made such a direct contrast between "charitable donations" and "owning a car." Because that actually subtly misrepresents the situation on some level.
Instead, I would have listed out the major categories of expenses: "Well, we need to pay for house, which is super expensive here. We need to buy food, and we need to pay for water and for the air conditioning. (Or whatever your big expenses are.) And we also use some of our income to help children who might die from malaria, because they can't afford even a bug screen. You know how we collect cans for the food bank?[1] It's like that. We could live in a much smaller house, or we could work together to cook all our meals from scratch. Or I suppose we could spend less helping kids, but that would be sad, because nobody else might help those kids."
It's not a one-to-one tradeoff. It's a larger question of all your budgeting priorities. And yes, I admit this is a bit like asking a 2 year old if they want to wear their blue pants or their orange pants, when the two year old doesn't want to put on pants at all. But it really isn't a direct one-to-one tradeoff between "helping others" and "having a car."
[1] Just about the only time it makes sense to buy cans for a food bank is when teaching young kids about helping other people. Most food banks would prefer cash, because they can buy in bulk at wholesale prices, and they can often negotiate discounts from sympathetic distributors. A good food bank can stretch a dollar really far. I have had food bank people be really blunt about this. And of course, those donations would stretch even further if spent in another country. But I feel like "money for maximally effective charity" and "money to help out unfortunate people in my community" come from slightly different budgeting categories, sort of like what C.S. Lewis referred to as "general" and "specific" beneficience. Maybe for EA, donating $20 to the local food bank goes under discretionary income; that's fine.
That sounds like a good discussion for a high school age kid, but it sounds more like this kid is Elementary level. They have short attention spans and the longer you drone on the less they get out of it.
Being denied things is an important part of growing up; I don't think spending more money on your child would necessarily benefit them in the long run. Sounds like all the basic needs are provided, so who can say whether a nicer vacation would be a net positive or a net negative?
As a bonus, it puts the birthday during summer. One of my friends and her sister (born in Jan and Feb, respectively) did birthday parties on their half birthdays - this let them do lots of things outside that wouldn’t have been possible in Seattle in January. My family did a good job of coming up with fun activities for me (the two biggest hits were paint your own pottery and Wii dance dance revolution), but the weather definitely meant that more creativity was required.
As with so many other criticisms of ethical consequentialism, a key factor in critiques of altruist parents is that sacrifices that greatly negatively impact one's children are already accepted when they're the status quo. During WW2, many fathers enlisted and sought roles that were on the more dangerous end. They were regarded as heroes. I know fathers who were volunteer smoke jumpers, and we all admired them. Similarly for people who forgo lots of income (=kids' college funds) to travel with their churches for a combination of poverty relief and prostelyzation. It is most certainly not the case that our society as a general rule stigmatizes putting larger social issues ahead of one's child's chances of success.
I'm not even sure I belong here, and I don't have kids, but:
I definitely think one of the big factors in turning me to MRA later in life was feminists basically making sexuality look like an impossible, dangerous, and evil thing. Similarly, a lot of leftist sermonizing that was unhooked from reality (this was about the Cold War in the 80s and crime in the 90s, given my advanced age) inclined me to the right. This was in the pre-Tea Party era, so there were still plenty of smart people writing in Commentary and National Review.
I kind of wonder if making materialism look like the Cool Thing Everyone Gets To Do But Me On Account of My Parents is going to produce a materialistic rebellion later on. Demonizing normal biological urges (though greed is much less elemental than sex) has a way of backfiring. I think the thing is probably to make sure you're not the reason the kid is having much less fun than everyone else around him.
This is a real problem that will only become more salient as the child grows up. Will Vasili have to wear clothes that are noticeably cheaper than his peers? Or avoid participating in events his friends are all in? Or take on student debt because his parents' extra resources went to charity?
In some ways though this is a universal child/parent problem, where the parents freely spend money on things they value and are reluctant to give the child money for things the child values.
Yeah, it does seem basically universal. Parents and their children live very tightly coupled lives, yet they're also independent people who may have different values and priorities, and it all changes over time too.
I don't think that there's any single "correct", one-size-fits-all way to deal with it, it's very much about tradeoffs, compromises, and treating each situation on its own. I wish good luck to all parents who have to consider these things on a daily basis.
"I don’t believe in lying to children, so I said, “we could buy a car. But instead, before you were born, your daddy and your Lindsey and I all made a promise to give ten percent of our income to help those worse off than us, and if we owned a car we couldn’t do that.”"
Have you thought about the possibility of him going through a young Republican phase?
Or, this being Silicon Valley, some kind of neoreaction/technolibertarianism...
Just for context, when you mention "your daddy and your Lindsey and I", who is Lindsey? Someone who live with and who has a frequent, personal relationship with Vasili?
"Eighteenth-century Quakers thought that they knew what made people do evil: why they feasted while beggars slept outside their doors; why they insisted (sometimes violently) on unearned honor and power by virtue of their birth; why they murdered strangers for the glory of a king neither they nor the stranger had met. The problem was lack of simplicity."
Utilitarians are so recognizable 😅. It's tempting for me to translate "simplicity" into entropy, in which case we can use the utility-maximization-as-entropy-minimization idea to equate this to saying that they were utility maximizers.
Recently I've been wondering if the utility-maximizer vice of wanting to tile the universe with paperclips or god worship or orgasmium or batteries or whatever is because of the tendency towards entropy minimization.
The obvious thing to do would be to invert it and say that you should maximize entropy - but that would involve setting everything on fire which seems kind of hellish.
But similar to how nobody takes utilitarianism completely seriously, we could also ask what happens if we don't take entropy-maximization completely seriously, until we've come up with a better idea. For instance, capabilitarianism seems well-aligned with some aspects of entropy-maximization. While a utility maximizer might say that you shouldn't eat a fruit because it's got free energy that the utility maximizer needs for their project, an entropy maximizer might say that you should eat a fruit so you can use it's free energy to do new things. Basically, the picture would be that any unused resource is an opportunity that needs to be developed in a unique way.
I'm not sure how to solve the whole "setting fire to stuff" problem, though one starting point might be that it's not literal physical entropy that should be maximized, but rather epistemic entropy in the sense of "if it all seems the same to me, it's all the same". Like heat might have a lot of entropy in the sense of molecules wooshing around in lots of unique patterns, but I just think of it as heat.
Notably, if you eat the fruit and use it in your body, then I think that's *preeetty* close entropy-wise to if you just released its energy as heat, since all the energy you get from it ultimately turns into waste heat. There's just a brief phase where the processing is slightly slower than if you set fire to it (but much faster than if you let the fruit be alone). So I'm thinking entropy maximization is a much closer approximation of goodness than utility maximization is.
Any sort of consequentialism is minimising entropy in the sense that it's trying to reduce the future states of the world to exclude as many dispreferred states as possible.
The second law of thermodynamics flatly prohibits reducing the number of states the future can be in, and goal directed behaviour generally cares about the expected value of future states rather than how many possible future states there are.
Further, if that were true and meaningful, it would also apply to your "entropy maximising" behaviour - but obviously trying to maximise entropy is possible, so it must not be.
Tangential question: Have you checked his iron levels? Iron deficiencies are common and treatable with vegan supplements, but iron in vegetables is often more poorly absorbed than iron in meat and the calcium that's very common in dairy products can impede iron absorption.
You wrote:
> I don’t believe in lying to children, so I said, “we could buy a car. But instead, before you were born, your daddy and your Lindsey and I all made a promise
OK, first, this isn't criticism, it's "here's another way I might have handled this, maybe it would work here, maybe it wouldn't, you're the person with the most info."
But personally, as a parent, I'm not sure if I would have made such a direct contrast between "charitable donations" and "owning a car." Because that actually subtly misrepresents the situation on some level.
Instead, I would have listed out the major categories of expenses: "Well, we need to pay for house, which is super expensive here. We need to buy food, and we need to pay for water and for the air conditioning. (Or whatever your big expenses are.) And we also use some of our income to help children who might die from malaria, because they can't afford even a bug screen. You know how we collect cans for the food bank?[1] It's like that. We could live in a much smaller house, or we could work together to cook all our meals from scratch. Or I suppose we could spend less helping kids, but that would be sad, because nobody else might help those kids."
It's not a one-to-one tradeoff. It's a larger question of all your budgeting priorities. And yes, I admit this is a bit like asking a 2 year old if they want to wear their blue pants or their orange pants, when the two year old doesn't want to put on pants at all. But it really isn't a direct one-to-one tradeoff between "helping others" and "having a car."
[1] Just about the only time it makes sense to buy cans for a food bank is when teaching young kids about helping other people. Most food banks would prefer cash, because they can buy in bulk at wholesale prices, and they can often negotiate discounts from sympathetic distributors. A good food bank can stretch a dollar really far. I have had food bank people be really blunt about this. And of course, those donations would stretch even further if spent in another country. But I feel like "money for maximally effective charity" and "money to help out unfortunate people in my community" come from slightly different budgeting categories, sort of like what C.S. Lewis referred to as "general" and "specific" beneficience. Maybe for EA, donating $20 to the local food bank goes under discretionary income; that's fine.
That sounds like a good discussion for a high school age kid, but it sounds more like this kid is Elementary level. They have short attention spans and the longer you drone on the less they get out of it.
Being denied things is an important part of growing up; I don't think spending more money on your child would necessarily benefit them in the long run. Sounds like all the basic needs are provided, so who can say whether a nicer vacation would be a net positive or a net negative?
> Actually half-birthday because he has a January birthday and I want the present holidays spaced six months apart.
As another January birthday haver, I would have given up a substantial number of nice things in my childhood in exchange for this policy :P
Same, haha. And my kid has a January birthday, too, so maybe we'll try this when they're old enough.
As a bonus, it puts the birthday during summer. One of my friends and her sister (born in Jan and Feb, respectively) did birthday parties on their half birthdays - this let them do lots of things outside that wouldn’t have been possible in Seattle in January. My family did a good job of coming up with fun activities for me (the two biggest hits were paint your own pottery and Wii dance dance revolution), but the weather definitely meant that more creativity was required.
To be fair, Viktor is a really cool name, but Vasili is also awesome. So I understand his choice.
As with so many other criticisms of ethical consequentialism, a key factor in critiques of altruist parents is that sacrifices that greatly negatively impact one's children are already accepted when they're the status quo. During WW2, many fathers enlisted and sought roles that were on the more dangerous end. They were regarded as heroes. I know fathers who were volunteer smoke jumpers, and we all admired them. Similarly for people who forgo lots of income (=kids' college funds) to travel with their churches for a combination of poverty relief and prostelyzation. It is most certainly not the case that our society as a general rule stigmatizes putting larger social issues ahead of one's child's chances of success.
I'm not even sure I belong here, and I don't have kids, but:
I definitely think one of the big factors in turning me to MRA later in life was feminists basically making sexuality look like an impossible, dangerous, and evil thing. Similarly, a lot of leftist sermonizing that was unhooked from reality (this was about the Cold War in the 80s and crime in the 90s, given my advanced age) inclined me to the right. This was in the pre-Tea Party era, so there were still plenty of smart people writing in Commentary and National Review.
I kind of wonder if making materialism look like the Cool Thing Everyone Gets To Do But Me On Account of My Parents is going to produce a materialistic rebellion later on. Demonizing normal biological urges (though greed is much less elemental than sex) has a way of backfiring. I think the thing is probably to make sure you're not the reason the kid is having much less fun than everyone else around him.
Just my .000002 bitcoin.
This is a real problem that will only become more salient as the child grows up. Will Vasili have to wear clothes that are noticeably cheaper than his peers? Or avoid participating in events his friends are all in? Or take on student debt because his parents' extra resources went to charity?
In some ways though this is a universal child/parent problem, where the parents freely spend money on things they value and are reluctant to give the child money for things the child values.
Yeah, it does seem basically universal. Parents and their children live very tightly coupled lives, yet they're also independent people who may have different values and priorities, and it all changes over time too.
I don't think that there's any single "correct", one-size-fits-all way to deal with it, it's very much about tradeoffs, compromises, and treating each situation on its own. I wish good luck to all parents who have to consider these things on a daily basis.
Interesting post
"I don’t believe in lying to children, so I said, “we could buy a car. But instead, before you were born, your daddy and your Lindsey and I all made a promise to give ten percent of our income to help those worse off than us, and if we owned a car we couldn’t do that.”"
Have you thought about the possibility of him going through a young Republican phase?
Or, this being Silicon Valley, some kind of neoreaction/technolibertarianism...
Good post, these are questions I also think about.
Vasili is named for Vasili Arkhipov?
Yep!
Just for context, when you mention "your daddy and your Lindsey and I", who is Lindsey? Someone who live with and who has a frequent, personal relationship with Vasili?
Lindsey is Vasili's uncle and third primary caregiver.
"Eighteenth-century Quakers thought that they knew what made people do evil: why they feasted while beggars slept outside their doors; why they insisted (sometimes violently) on unearned honor and power by virtue of their birth; why they murdered strangers for the glory of a king neither they nor the stranger had met. The problem was lack of simplicity."
Utilitarians are so recognizable 😅. It's tempting for me to translate "simplicity" into entropy, in which case we can use the utility-maximization-as-entropy-minimization idea to equate this to saying that they were utility maximizers.
Recently I've been wondering if the utility-maximizer vice of wanting to tile the universe with paperclips or god worship or orgasmium or batteries or whatever is because of the tendency towards entropy minimization.
The obvious thing to do would be to invert it and say that you should maximize entropy - but that would involve setting everything on fire which seems kind of hellish.
But similar to how nobody takes utilitarianism completely seriously, we could also ask what happens if we don't take entropy-maximization completely seriously, until we've come up with a better idea. For instance, capabilitarianism seems well-aligned with some aspects of entropy-maximization. While a utility maximizer might say that you shouldn't eat a fruit because it's got free energy that the utility maximizer needs for their project, an entropy maximizer might say that you should eat a fruit so you can use it's free energy to do new things. Basically, the picture would be that any unused resource is an opportunity that needs to be developed in a unique way.
I'm not sure how to solve the whole "setting fire to stuff" problem, though one starting point might be that it's not literal physical entropy that should be maximized, but rather epistemic entropy in the sense of "if it all seems the same to me, it's all the same". Like heat might have a lot of entropy in the sense of molecules wooshing around in lots of unique patterns, but I just think of it as heat.
Notably, if you eat the fruit and use it in your body, then I think that's *preeetty* close entropy-wise to if you just released its energy as heat, since all the energy you get from it ultimately turns into waste heat. There's just a brief phase where the processing is slightly slower than if you set fire to it (but much faster than if you let the fruit be alone). So I'm thinking entropy maximization is a much closer approximation of goodness than utility maximization is.
Utilitarianism has nothing to do with minimising entropy though?
Any sort of consequentialism is minimising entropy in the sense that it's trying to reduce the future states of the world to exclude as many dispreferred states as possible.
The second law of thermodynamics flatly prohibits reducing the number of states the future can be in, and goal directed behaviour generally cares about the expected value of future states rather than how many possible future states there are.
Further, if that were true and meaningful, it would also apply to your "entropy maximising" behaviour - but obviously trying to maximise entropy is possible, so it must not be.
Tangential question: Have you checked his iron levels? Iron deficiencies are common and treatable with vegan supplements, but iron in vegetables is often more poorly absorbed than iron in meat and the calcium that's very common in dairy products can impede iron absorption.
I would be surprised if he did, because Ozy wrote something a while ago about iron deficiency in vegan diets.
Thanks for the reminder, it's reassuring to me.