I wouldn't have offspring because I don't want to have anyone be born into this world; it's awful. On the other paw, I would adopt if it could help someone already having to exist in this world to lead their best life.

The elevation of the individual as supreme to the communal is inherently anti-child rearing, the most communal of acts

This is a great article. It's why I roll my eyes when someone asks "Show me the data" or the classic "Sources please."

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."

You don't declare your position on this issue, which irritating. What do you actually think is good or bad? It seems like you're anti-individual, pro-religion (or "telos", but that always seems to be a subset of some religion whenever you mention it), and pro-reproduction, but only as a side effect of the religion. You don't want us to be coerced, or coerced into approving of pressure to conform, but you want us to conform willingly. You want us to have a sense of place and community identity, and you want us to live like ants and reproduce a lot with diminished individualism. Why? Just because, I guess.

Well, I don't want that, those aren't my values, I like individualism. You use words in odd ways 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 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.