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Notes -
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.
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".
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.
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.
Ah, I see how what I wrote looks like that. I was gesturing more towards "bay-area rationalists are a very unusual culture with nonstandard beliefs, and she has bought deeply into those beliefs, and she occupies a fairly prominent position within that culture".
A central tenet of those beliefs is something like "fuck the natural state of things, fuck stodgy traditionalists, fuck the people who sneer on anything which seems weird to them. We can do it better because we are very smart and we are willing to do weird icky things if a cost-benefit analysis says it's worthwhile". I would not describe this strategy as "highly competent" so much as "high-variance" -- when it works it works great (see the number of bitcoin multimillionaires, calling out COVID as impactful very early) but when it fails it fails spectacularly (see SBF among quite a large number of other less prominent things).
I expect someone who buys into those beliefs to be far more willing than typical to accept something "weird and icky" like surrogacy if it gets her what she wants. And also I think it just may be a lot less universal than you think for women to crave the miracle of being pregnant and giving birth specifically, rather than craving the miracle of having her own offspring. (For reference, even outside of the rat community I've heard the topic of maybe using IVF come up a handful of times, and I think surrogacy came up in every one of those conversations).
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