Month: October 2014

Reihan Salam takes the conversation to what might be its logical conclusion:

[P]erhaps Silicon Valley is simply seeing the future before the rest of us do. Many talented female employees are balancing a desire to climb the corporate ladder with an unwillingness to foreclose the possibility of having children. The executives who’ve embraced the idea of paying for egg-freezing coverage are doing their best to meet the needs of these workers. That said, the fact that a growing number of working women are interested in the procedure is in itself an acknowledgment that it is difficult to combine child-rearing with the all-consuming, more-than-full-time professional work that we find in the uppermost echelons of the American economy. …

[I]f we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution.

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different.

Annalee Newitz is totally on board:

An artificial womb – now there is a technology that could transform everything. No more paying for those frozen eggs or expensive fertility treatments. No more potentially fatal pregnancies and births. No more women terrified that their “biological clocks” are ticking; no more of the pain and discomfort of pregnancy. Women and men would be liberated from having to use (and often abuse) women’s bodies to make cute little humans.

If you look back at the twentieth century, it’s undeniable that one of the most important technologies to emerge – one that changed social relationships, families, and our understanding of biology – was the birth control pill. As Jonathan Eig argues in a fascinating new book on the topic, the Pill was the culmination of decades of research. It was a major scientific breakthrough. And it transformed the lives of everyone, male and female alike. Women could enjoy sex the way men always had, without fear that one moment of pleasure would have life-altering consequences.

If the Pill brought us into the future, imagine where an artificial womb would take us.

Meanwhile, back to the in-tray, a reader disputes the argument that young adults are better suited for parenthood:

I’m a 46-year-old father of a three-year-old and a nine-month-old. My partner is 48. We met in our early 40s, and we tried to start a family when we knew it was right, but we couldn’t conceive the usual way or through in-vitro fertilization. We eventually had a donor egg and have since given birth to two beautiful boys.

I do have less energy then I did at 25 or 35, which makes it more difficult to chase the kids around or stay up nights bottle-feeding (or, in my partner’s case, breastfeeding). However, I believe I’m a much better father now then I would have been at an earlier point in my life. Having been able to experience life has made me much more patient, content, and laid-back.

I grew up in a dysfunctional home with alcoholic parents, and by doing some work on myself, I’m now able to spot my demons and manage them much better than when I could in my youthful, high-energy days. Plus, my salary is triple what it was in my 20s, and I’ve been able to establish myself in a job that allows me flexibility to deal with the surprises that my two little devils are waiting to unleash. We’ve both upped our life insurance, and we realize that no early retirement is in our future. We are very happy with this lot in life.

And another questions the efficacy of egg-freezing:

The real issue with the procedure is that the odds of producing a live baby on any one IVF cycle are no better than 50%, without using frozen eggs.  The typical egg retrieval is 5 to 12 eggs, which are used for one cycle, with the take-home-baby rate dropping as the number of eggs retrieved drops.  There’s an upward limit on how many eggs can be retrieved, because too much stimulation causes Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome.   If the number of eggs retrieved is on the low side (closer to 5 than 12), the woman would need to do more than one retrieval to reach a 50% chance of taking home a baby when she chooses to use her eggs.

A woman who does two retrievals, each of which retrieves over 10 eggs, can do two IVF cycles, giving her something around a 60% to 70% chance of taking home a baby, still not great odds, if her other choice was to have children at a younger age.  Each retrieval is a month of daily hormone injections, medical monitoring, and an outpatient procedure, none of it without risks (see Ovarian Hyperstimulation Syndrome).

Even The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists doesn’t recommend egg freezing as a way to delay fertility.  Yet the idea is being pushed and discussed in the media, rarely with much skepticism.

This is how the free market American medical system works.  A new technology gets pushed, usually by the people who stand to benefit, such as fertility clinics eager to expand their client base beyond infertile couples.  The media picks it up, often without questioning or investigating the science or the numbers, despite the fact that they are out there and easily Googled.  There’s no systematic process of questioning the hypothesis pushed.

Well there is at the Dish, at least – your emails. Another reader takes a new approach:

I only have a moment, as I’m one of those older parents (53) with a 12 year old who I need to get to bed, but I have one word that I’d like to put out there in response to the “need” to freeze eggs so that it’s possible to become a parent later in life: ADOPTION!

How about if more companies offered adoption benefits. That way, employees of all ages and fertility “abilities” could become parents if and when they wanted to, AND more children in desperate need of homes would have the opportunity to find their forever families. In the frantic quest to have their “own” child, so many people are missing out on the amazing blessing of adoption, which can be a win-win-win – for a child, the parent(s) and society.

Having had children by birth in my 20s, and another by adoption in my 40s, I can personally attest that energy levels decrease; but, having come to parenthood both by birth and adoption, I can also attest that each of my children is 100% “mine” and that the joys and challenges and miracles of parenthood are gifts beyond compare at any age.

I wonder if all of the companies that offer egg-freezing benefits also offer comprehensive adoption benefits.  If they don’t, they certainly should!

Follow the whole discussion thread here.

In his new volume of prose reflections, The Labyrinth: God, Darwin, and the Meaning of Life, the poet and atheist Philip Appleman comes to terms with life’s meaning in a world where God is “an unnecessary hypothesis.” Daniel Thomas Moran praises Appleman’s book, summarizing its message as “we must care for one another, for this planet we exist on only briefly, and for all the living things that share it with us”:

We who call ourselves humanist or agnostic or atheist don’t have the available remedy of luxuriating in the pat explanations of ancient texts or the bumptious pronouncements of holy men. To a greater degree than those who get answers from priests, preachers, imams, or rabbis, we nonbelievers must invest more of ourselves in the great wrestling with our nature, and surely, our fate as mortal beings. How many times have all of us been asked by people of faith how it is that our lives can have meaning in the absence of a belief in a god and an afterlife? Unlike the blindly faithful, we refuse to find our meaning in the worship of death and in the chimera of an eternal life.

Appleman sums it up with grace and directness as only a poet can:

Once definitely done with our adolescent longing for the Absolute, we would find this world valuable after all, and poignantly valuable precisely because it is not eternal. Doomed to extinction, our loves, our work, our friendships, our tastes are all painfully precious. We look about us, on the streets and in the subways, and discover that we are beautiful because we are mortal, priceless because we are so rare in the universe and so fleeting. Whatever we are, whatever we make of ourselves: that is all we will ever have—and that, in its profound simplicity, is the meaning of life.

The Labyrinth is perhaps the book we have been waiting for, the one Philip Appleman has been waiting a lifetime to write. It is a comfort. Let it also be a companion.

OkCupid co-founder Christian Rudder advocates it in his new book Dataclysm:

[On OkCupid] the copy-and-paste [message-sending] strategy underperforms from-scratch-messaging by about 25 percent, but in terms of effort-in to results-out it always wins: measuring by replies received per unit effort, it’s many times more efficient to just send everyone roughly the same thing than to compose a new message each time. I’ve told people about guys copying and pasting, and the response is usually some version of “That’s so lame.” When I tell them that boilerplate is 75 percent as effective as something original, they’re skeptical — surely almost everyone sees through the formula. […] [L]et me tell you something. Nearly every single thing on my desk, on my person, probably in my entire home, was made in a factory alongside who knows how many copies. I just fought a crowd to pick up my lunch, which was a sandwich chosen from a wall of sandwiches. Templates work. […] Innovation is using a few keyboard shortcuts to save […] some time.

In a review of the book, Evan Selinger protests Rudder’s logic:

This passage is disturbing in several respects.

First, Rudder treats the process of communication in purely instrumental terms: it’s a numbers game and to win you’ve got to maximize your response-to-effort ratio. Now, it could be argued that during the early stages of dating, minimal effort is appropriate. After all, people are busy, and they can take a more conscientious and personalized approach to socialization after things go to the next level and it becomes clear what a particular individual is worth. But Rudder doesn’t convey a sense that as relationships deepen so do our responsibilities. Instead, he posits an unnerving equivalence between people and commodities. That’s the second problem: Rudder’s comparison of people to factory goods. Sure, most of us take advantage of mass production and treat artisanal wares as … well … treats. But viewing people, or even delicious sandwiches, as widgets is dehumanizing to anyone, not just Marxists! …

[Another] problem is that Rudder associates innovation with efficiency. This is Silicon Valley dogma: friction is bad because it slows people down and generates opportunity costs that prevent us from doing the things we really care about; minimizing friction is good because it closes the gap between intending to do something and actually doing it. Such a cavalier attitude toward efficiency-enhancing technology creates the impression that at any moment we can slow down and behave more thoughtfully and deliberately. But why assume this is the case when technology companies are providing us with ever-increasing opportunities to do things hyper-efficiently and creating an infrastructure that’s conducive to cut-and-paste culture?

But in an interview last month, Rudder marveled at the way data can pinpoint personal information:

What statistics and other crazy facts about human nature did you discover while researching this book?

Honestly, some of the craziest stuff were things where these guys in the UK looked at Facebook likes and — it’s insane, that from just your likes, forgetting your social network or pictures — that you can tell, with incredible degrees of certainty, shit about you, down to your race, to 95 percent. Which makes sense, if you’re really into Tyler Perry or whatever you can probably make a guess about your ethnicity. But you know, sexuality — it was at 85 percent, and kind of like all the way down to “were your parents divorced,” which is 50 percent.

Which is kind of intense, because it’s not a demographic fact about you, it’s just something that happened in your life history, especially because likes have only been around for five years. That’s not very much time. I’m 39, so I was starting to realize I knew kids whose parents had been divorced around maybe ’85 or whatever, and they were into Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest. I remember this one kid, I went to his house and he wanted to stay up all night and watch the Ozzy Osbourne concert on HBO… The kids I knew who were from stable, more normal households back then were into REM or whatever. You can see it in life, but it’s cool that they were able to actually pull it away from a “this one guy one time” into a thing that’s more legit.

Surveying four decades of criticism chronicling how SNL has lost its edge, Ian Crouch posits that the Internet has sounded the true knell for the show:

The final death of “S.N.L.” … may coincide with the death of live television itself.  “S.N.L.” has faced challenges from other shows in the past, but, now, everything that is funny anywhere, at any time, is a challenge. On television, Comedy Central’s “Key & Peele” and “Inside Amy Schumer” can make the sketches on “S.N.L.” look slapdash and tame; the topical sharpness of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” often makes Weekend Update seem meek and scattered; and surreal shows like “Drunk History” and “Nathan for You” produce moments of left-field oddity that rarely make it past “S.N.L.” ’s dress rehearsals.

And that’s just what’s on television, never mind the surfeit of great series and amateur comedy creations on the Web. Many of these are carefully shot and meticulously edited, giving them a polish that surpasses what can be managed on a weekly, live stage show. And, like with “S.N.L.,” we can watch them whenever we want. And so, as fewer people arrange their lives to be on the couch on Saturday nights, the limitations of the live form begin to seem less thrilling, and more like a liability.

Coincidentally, the YouTube ad attached to the above video from Key and Peele featured an old SNL duo: