On interpreting data, seems like they're coming at LessWrong from a different angle? Bayes? Scientific Method? [1]

A bit more detail:

Demographic transition has been an explicit policy goal for decades. I imagine most moderate+ people have bought into the family planning concept. Yes the logistic equation predicts it could happen automatically too [1]. And no, collectively we've decided we don't want to find out for sure.

Some conservative confessionals just haven't bought into it. Because fair-or-not they might not buy into anything without a century of thought first.

This pretty much covers a big chunk of Tantaman's data from a different angle I think.

[1] All methods that study how priors shape what you explore.

[2] For instance: house, food, and fuel prices are signals for this kind of thing. I can imagine lots of conversations going "Can we really afford one more? We're up short as is!"

Well, I don't want that, those aren't my values, I like individualism. You use words in odd ways (what's "formation"?) so I lose track of your meaning anyway, so maybe I got your values wrong, who knows. You're kind of shady about your values.

This makes me wonder about whether having a purpose (telos) is a good value, and about the purpose of purpose. But I think wondering that is not the way forward. People have a sense of purpose innately, it just gets foggy sometimes, we don't need to tell them to have one, only tell them what it might be.

In fact, it appears to be a recurrence of the pattern that is perhaps the most common religious view for "why do people no longer have children": "it is because they don't have purpose". Usually explicitly, and often implicitly we are informed that some religion (or any religion, occasionally) has purpose. One can then dress up these arguments in the language of other philosophy - and perhaps that is the way to buttress them - but it doesn't change the fundamental idea.

To lean harder into the aspects of my 'formation' by contrast, I think one can seek more parsimonious views. My personal pet theory is that it's all opportunity cost. Here are the assumptions:

# The joy inherent to being a parent is prosperity-independent

# Benefit from the rest of society is positive-correlated to prosperity

# Late gestation and the early stages of parenthood affect the ability to access benefit from society

So you can vary the outcome by varying the parameters:

* Make a society richer, c.p., and you miss out on more things

* Make a society more culturally oriented around families and you reduce the impact of #3

* Pay people to substitute for parental responsibilities and you reduce the impact of #3

* Remove individual freedom and a reckoning of utility no longer determines fertility

I did not know that parents in higher-income groups in the same education stratum have higher fertility. It's not obvious which way the coin lands on that, admittedly. Years off work are more costly the more successful your career. But also if you're sufficiently successful, you have access to more resources that permit you still access society's utility. Certainly my friends pay $90k for a nanny and you're not going to get that unless you hit some level of income.

Anyway, I have a lovely daughter, and I am eager to have another. I think it is a greatly enjoyable experience to parent, and I suspect there is some aspect to sociocultural contagion here because women have told my wife "watching how cute your baby is has made want one too" and things like that.

Here's a blog post about the opportunity cost thing to make it clear I didn't just come up with it as a middle-brow dismissal in reaction (if it is middle-brow it is wholly so ex nihilo)

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-14/Fertility_Ra...

And here's a little bit more about what it's like to walk around as a father in a city with some of the fewest children per capita in the US.

https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-08-06/The_Latent_D...

But let's ask some more questions.

The positive correlation between income and number of children, within education bands, is intriguing - and yet doesn't explain why policies intended to be pro-birth - generous financial support for young families, for example, seem to be ineffective. Even accepting that education does suppress the birth rate relative to income, increasing income ought to fix that.. but doesn't.

Perhaps there's a different story here, that income and number of children within a given education bracket isn't causal - that a third factor is behind both - or even that the causal arrow points the other way: if you've got lots of kids, you _have_ to take that higher-paying job, because you need to keep them fed and housed.

And there's an unspoken assumption that education = individualism, and that these are antonyms to communitarian-conservatism. Which isn't exactly true, and we can look at societies which sustain relatively high levels of both.

Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative. Not in the obvious way along Islamic or shouty Evangelical lines - morals around sex and alcohol are relatively relaxed - but in most other respects it's a distinct, cohesive and traditionalist culture, one which places more value on faith and nation than many.

They've high income, strong child support policy, and their birth rate is.. not much better than avowedly secular-liberal countries nearby. And a disproportionate number of kids are born to immigrants, which of course upsets the traditionalists.

But again, look for third factors. Do immigrants have more children because they're from "that kind of culture", or does the sort of innate drive which motivates somebody to pack their bags for a new life in a new country (by no means the easy path) also motivate them to have a family?

Or, flip that around, is there a "drag" factor affecting people who don't emigrate/immigrate, and that's suppressing "native" births? I certainly know more than a few people for whom that appears to be a thing, they're just kind of lightly anesthetized to life.

But I've also heard it said that some folks have always been that way, and that what's driving lower birth rates is more that on one hand fewer unplanned kids are being born (because contraception, and vastly lower teen pregnancy rates), and on the other, the women who do have kids (which has never been anywhere near "all") are often having one or two less than they'd ideally like for economic reasons.

Unless we're literally having a debate about raw statistics, the data likely adds nothing to either side of the debate; because the data is not answering any actual questions and you can draw opposite conclusions from the same data. Just because the data appears to fit nicely to a particular mainstream narrative, that doesn't make the narrative true because one could come up with an infinite number of different narratives which provide a better fit for the data...

Which narrative is more likely to be right? The one narrative which you happen to have inside your head or the infinite number of other possible narratives which you haven't even heard of?

My experience is that the mainstream narrative is designed to cater to the lowest common denominator amongst the masses... Which nowadays are made up of a lot of highly educated people... But the narrative is nonetheless simplistic. There are many people out there who have had exposure to enough different data points in their lives that the mainstream narratives don't make sense to them.

Your understanding of the world is narratives + data. When you say that you make decisions "entirely based on data," you're missing some crucial aspect because you're almost certainly using a narrative to fill in the many gaps in the data.

Not to mention that many correlations are self-reinforcing feedback cycles without clear causality.

The very idea that causality is always simple and unidirectional is itself a narrative... And I would argue an incorrect one! Yet many scientific fields are founded on this narrative!

In my experience, I can't recall reading a single paper in the social sciences describing causality as "likely a self-reinforcing feedback cycle" - Even this language sounds unscientific. They're always trying to prove causality. It seems like nobody ever tries to prove "Likely a feedback cycle" because nobody likes these ambiguous answers.

I suspect this is because science almost always has a financial goal behind it and people want definite answers. They want to be able to use the data to craft a narrative like "No, drug X definitely doesn't cause condition Y."

The blue screen of love.