Is it rational for a rationalist to want to be a parent, knowing that having a kid rewrite your utility function? (so said parent would accept sacrificing their life for saving the life of their child)
It looks like the futurama brain slug parasites that someone explained me about last time I asked: https://futurama.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Slug
It's even less rational for a woman, given the many damages it causes to the body (something he discusses in the article)
I often see having a kid "creates a joy that couldn't be experienced before", but the same thing could be said about drugs: you want to preserve your utility function from such deep influences, so you try to avoid getting addicted to drugs.
If one wouldn't rationally chose to get addicted, why chose getting a child?
The only reason I see is in the title: as a psychological protection about death (the pun on "in the long run, we're all dead")
In case the person finds no other meaning in life, a cheap way out is to create one by reinterpreting the path-dependent set of random events (I wouldn't be here if my parents didn't have a kid, etc, and neither would the human race), choosing to continue this chain and call that "meaning"
I'm not convinced. The whole article seems like an elaborate rationalization (especially the part of lack of sleep and lack of free time) to try to convince the author and the followers as noted in the meta:
> I think it’s a conspiracy. All the pronatalist influencers get together and say that pregnancy isn’t so bad. Young women believe them, and so the human race survives another generation
YES