> A good rule to live by is to ask "what would happen if everyone did X?"
This is an awful rule to live by. There are very few things in the world that _everyone_ would actually do.
This is an awful rule to live by. There are very few things in the world that _everyone_ would actually do.
I feel like this "law" really fails to account that not everybody on Earth is the same person and won't do the same thing because they either don't want to or can't.
Not everybody will want to use an emulator (because they want to play online, have a deckable console, or whatever other reason) or be able to get one (because they don't have a powerful enough pc). And people using emulators might make additional publicity that might bring new consumers to Nintendo products.
But also remember that this is about human choices, not forced realities. The thought experiment is about what happens if everyone chooses to act in a certain way, not if everyone is a literal copy/paste automaton. To illustrate, even if everyone decided they didn't want kids, assuredly thousands/millions would still have "whoopsie" babies.
With regards to choosing to have three kids: overpopulation, famine, and destruction of Earth are not a given. Firstly (and again) because nowhere close to everyone on Earth is actually able to have three kids for a variety of reasons, and secondly because even if you did have exponential population growth you can avoid those things, mostly by colonizing space / building vertically / Dyson Sphere / etc. Unlikely but not a given so therefore hard to argue its necessarily bad.
So, like, if John really dislikes Joe, the rule saying "if you really dislike someone, punch Joe in the face" wouldn't be a rule of the appropriate sense. It doesn't make sense that if Steve really disliked Erwin, that he would punch Joe in the face as a result.
The rule that John should be considering whether he would approve of, is closer to[1] the rule "If you really dislike someone, punch them in the face." . Presumably John would find this rule less appealing than "If you really dislike someone, punch Joe in the face.", because someone might dislike John and therefore punch John in the face, and John would rather not be punched in the face.
So, in the case you gave an example of, about "whether to have children", the question would be along the lines of, "If everyone decided whether to have children (as well as how many) using the same criteria that you are using (where these criteria could include their personal tastes, aspirations, etc. as a factor), would you approve of the outcome?" This seems quite compatible with the ways that people differ.
Like, it isn't about assuming everyone behaves in the same way, but about assuming everyone responds to their desires and motivations in "the same way", for the right sense of "the same way".
[1] I won't say that this is exactly the right rule to consider. idk. Probably not quite.
Also, leave it to HN to take some news about video game emulation to a discussion about antinatalism, haha
Also it would be 2.something not 2 exactly, because some number of people die from various causes before reproducing.
Of course, due to mortality we actually need more than 2. Around 2.1 - 2.4 for most developed nations IIRC.
And this doesn't hold if the household have more than one wives, say.
Even if every human were single and babies were made in sperm banks and creches, and every human was assigned one baby from the pool to raise, you still "have" 2 kids, in the sense that you took part in the creation of 2 kids.
I don't know how this needs to be explained to any human?
It takes 2 to replace 2. Not 1 for 1, 2 for 2.
How the ever loving F do you wind up asking about the 2 kids mating with each other? What the hell is going on in there?
The context though is the current real world: It’s perfectly fine to have 1 kid or even no kids at all and just adopt existing orphans, because a lot of other people have been having way more than 2 kids for way too long.
Someone misunderstood the purpose off that question, and said that by that logic everyone should have 2 kids. They were wrong about that but not because the number 2 was wwrong. 2, or really 2.something, is the number that everyone has to have, IF they were applying the "what if everyone does X" correctly.
What they were wrong about was a couple things:
1 The question isn't a simple litteral absolute rule. It's a tool that you use along with others to evaluate some idea or action. It only helps judge one dimension among many.
A previous commenter gave the simple example of queues. Imagine you have figured out a trick that lets you get away with jumping every line. The trick works. No one else in the line ever complains that you're cutting instead of waiting for your turn.
What's the harm then? Free market people like to try to excuse bad actions that way. Maybe the trick is you tell a joke, so it's a transaction, the people you cut in front of voluntarily let you and they got a funny joke out of it.
The question exposes the problem, because, ok, cool, life hack, do this trick and never have to wait in a line again. Since it's sound advice, let's teach this knowledge to everyone in schools. What happens then? Does it still work?
This exposes that this advantage you are taking is actually coming from somewhere. You aren't just more efficient at lines, you are benefitting only on the backs of everyone else.
2 In this case the X in "What if everyone did X?" wouldn't be "have exactly 2.36 children" it would be more like "had however many children they wanted"
Because it turns out that people want different things, and so if you just let everyone have however many kids they want or feel they can manage, it more or less works out naturally.
Everyone doesn't want 5 kids, or 0 kids, and so if everyone did what they want, it's fine, and so it's fine for you to have however many kids you want.
You CAN in fact have just 1 kid if you want.
But the thing you were replying to was about the basic math, and 2 was the right number in the context of that oversimplified misunderstanding of "what if everyone did that?" If letting people do what they want would not work out, and we had to make a rule to make everyone do exactly the same thing, it would indeed be everyone has to have 2 kids.
Yes!
> Is it immoral for me to have 3 kids because it means exponential growth, overpopulation, famine and destruction of the Earth? If we follow the logic to its end, the only moral choice is for everyone to have not 1, not 3 but exactly 2 kids.
Limiting to 2 would cause the extinction of the human race. Some people should have 3 so that we get a sustainable level of population growth - especially people in countries where the population is declining.
(I'm not anti-emulator, I'm not even a huge fan of the categorical imperative, but this is an astonishingly weak counterargument)
> Yes!
This is a flawed rule then.
There is no moral implication that you need to create kids.
There is also a number you can orientate yourself if you like to achieve a certain outcome
Nonetheless are you aware that Nintendo had quite bad numbers on and off?
It could have broken Nintendo.
Yes I think some people would cherry pick skewed numbers to justify whatever action they want, but doing it with good faith estimates is pretty helpful. Usually the answer is don't do that.