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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Anyone planning on having 3 kids with a 36-year-old is likely not going to be having 3 kids.

Do you know women with twins? If yes, have you seen how they live, what they do everyday? Expecting a 37 or 38-yr-old average middle-class woman, a rationalist on top of that, to nurture and raise twins isn't much realistic.

At her age, success rate per cycle is around 30%. This means that she’ll almost certainly require a couple of tries before she gives birth, which means that the second pregnancy attempt will almost certainly not happen sooner than 2 years later. By then, the chance of success will halve to less than 20%.

And that’s all assuming she starts tomorrow, instead of needing to find a partner and getting him to commit to having children together, which will take months on its own.

Considering the current social reality, it'd take years, not months. It's pretty much out of the question.

Surrogates exist.

When she was freezing the eggs, do you think she was planning to have another woman carry them for her?

In any case, I think that the medical establishment and media, if they were honest, should really repeat ad nauseam how low success rate IVF has above age of 35, so that women are less delusional about their future. Instead, medical establishment has every incentive to play down the low rates of success, given that they are paid for each attempt. Media, of course, keeps pretending that every woman can have it all, because of course she is a queen that deserves nothing less, and that’s all that matters.

I very much expect that was one of the planned-for contingencies, yes. I would not be shocked if she had explicitly put numbers on the probability it would come to that, and already made a decision on what she would do in that contingency.

I think you're modeling her as "typical 36-year-old woman who happens to exist in bay area rationalist circles" and I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".

See her post stating that is not just true, but too obvious to say that you should cryonically freeze yourself when you die, on the off-chance that you may be revived in the future. I think the set of people who can earnestly write that post and the set of people who object to having another woman carry their baby to term, on a deep enough level to not even consider the question, have very little intersection.

I'm modeling her as "one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, and who happens to be a woman".

If, say, in 4 years, she is still unmarried and childless, how will that affect your perception of the grasp of the reality of the "founding members of the bay area rationalist circles"?

If she's still unmarried and childless in 4 years, I would be pretty surprised (call it 3:1 against). I am not sure how that would affect "my grasp of the reality of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles" because I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.

Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy? Because I generally expect "transhumanist enough to support cryopreservation" would very strongly correlate with "willing to use 'unnatural' solutions like IVF and surrogacy".

I am not sure what it would mean to affect my perception of someone's grasp of a reality of a group of people.

Please excuse my poor grammar. What I was trying to convey is the following: you said that "[you are] modeling her as »one of the founding members of the bay area rationalist circles, who has bought very deeply into the transhumanist philosophy of that community, (...)«", which implies that you consider her highly competent on the basis of her deep association with a highly regarded group. Thus, if she turns out to be not so competent after all, this will cast doubt on whether we should continue regarding that group as competent.

Do you anticipate that she would have philosophical objections to surrogacy?

No, but that's beyond the point. Professional ethicists are not any more ethical than regular people, and progressive liberals somehow keep buying houses in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, after consulting with their peers as to where the "good schools" are. She will almost certainly not express any philosophical objections to surrogacy, and she probably will not even verbalize any explicit objections to it in her head. She will, however, feel deeply repulsed by the idea that she will need to give up such a fundamental human female experience, and hire a random person to do the job. This is very natural, so natural in fact that it probably hasn't even occurred to her that this might be her own fate when she was freezing these eggs in the first place.

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I've heard that the success rate of frozen eggs in geriatric pregnancies is a lot lower than it's commonly understood to be, but I'm not that knowledgeable on the subject.

Do surrogate mother change the chances - in that case just pay 50000-100000 to some woman to carry them to term.

But that just makes the choice all the more stark - if you're a guy who wants to start a family, why would you pick a woman who's nearing 40 to do that with, instead of a woman 10-15 years younger for whom you don't have to shell out $100,000 in conception fees?

Because there exist in the world such things as love. And a human is generally speaking more than the sum of its parameters and identities. Also she may be able to suck golf ball trough a garden hose.

One possible reason would be because you get along better with the one who is 40 and shares your values, and you personally are a late-career tech person in the bay who has made good financial decisions and probably has a net worth with 8 digits where "shell out $100,000" is just not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

I'm sure there's always at least one possible reason in the universe of possible reasons, but I'm trying to model what a typical man would do, not write a sitcom about a 40-year-old career woman who has a whole lotta love to give and is searching for someone who completes her. "Marry a millionaire" should not be anyone's plan for starting a family - if you've reached this point, odds are you've already lost the game.

She doesn't need to care about what a typical man would do, she needs to care about what the most desirable man who reads this and goes "you know, that is exactly what I'm looking for" does.

It is true that this approach would not scale to everyone doing it. I predict that

  1. This will in fact work out for her, because she is a prominent person in a community containing many neurodivergent people who weigh "smart" and "philosophically aligned" more heavily, and "functional", "young", and "fit" less heavily, in their evaluation of partners than is typical for the broader population.

  2. Conditional on this working out for her, it will inspire a number of people to do the same thing. It will mostly not work out for them, because they will mostly not have her advantages.

Or better yet: take the L, and don't reduce the motherhood of another person to a transaction. Leave the money to the kids of a family member who was smart enough to have them when the time was right.

Why?

Because there are certain things that are integral to our humanity, and motherhood is one of them. By buying it from another person you're dehumanizing them, and the child.

I am adopted. Is my real mother, my birth mother or me less than human? I know for sure that a lot of strings were pulled for that adoption to happen.

I am adopted. Is my real mother, my birth mother.

Objectively or sentimentally? Objectively, yeah she is, and even as far as sentiments are concerned, people usually believe adopted children have a right to know who their biological parents are.

or me less than human. I know for sure that a lot of strings were pulled for that adoption to happen

I didn't say surrogate children are less than human I said they're being treated inhumanely when they're bought. Whether your adoptive parents did that to you depends on the nature of the strings being pulled.

Is my real mother, my birth mother or me less than human?

Judging from your username, at least you and your birthmother (eggmother?).

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