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MIRI Researcher Don’t be a Quokka Challenge (IMPOSSIBLE).
Katja Grace posts “date me” document. Asks everyone to share.
I originally posted a similar link in the small-scale-questions thread in response to Tyler Cowen linking to the doc on MarginalRevolution. What I didn’t know at the time is that Katja apparently wants this to be spread everywhere?!?!?
Object-level thoughts: I quite liked it. The document makes a compelling case that will appeal strongly to a certain demographic of men. It’s pretty much exactly what you would expect from “mid-30s Bay Area rationalist woman ready to settle down and have kids,” expanded out into a full dating profile. It certainly caught my attention.
Meta-level thoughts: OH NO WHAT ARE YOU DOING? You can send out something like this to your blog readers. They’ll know how to interpret it, and they’re the kind of people you’d be interested in anyways. You can’t toss it out into the black void that is Twitter and expect to come out unscathed. She even dropped her personal email address at the end. Guess who’s going to need a new Gmail account next week?
Protip: If you are a woman, do not ever put something like this in your dating profile. This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
I feel bad for her getting dragged in the quote tweets, but like, what did she expect? Why, in response to getting a negative reaction, is she intent on spreading it even further? That’s the opposite of what she should be doing. Everyone who would be compatible with her has already seen it.
Anyone planning on having 3 kids with a 36-year-old is likely not going to be having 3 kids.
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.
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".
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