Robin Hanson
Associate professor of economics at George Mason University, originator of decision markets and futarchy, and author of the blog Overcoming Bias.
Robin Hanson did not write this page.
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Our reading
Cultural evolution, not biology, is the source of whatever makes humans distinctively special.
Their wordsBut as humanity's superpower is cultural evolution, what ever makes us special is in our culture.
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Their wordsLike our other bio-squishy descendants, our teaching and guidance should eventually show them how to join civilization.
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Their wordsAnd beware: people treated strongly enough like barbarians may come to act that way, at least for a time.
- 7 days earlier
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Their wordsthe modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture.
↗The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Pricesovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsFor the post-modern era, the process solutions that I've found to cultural drift are (a) letting capitalism run everything, (b) groups managed to raise futures market price estimates of future group adaptive success, and (c) large regions managed to improve futures market estimates of dates when we achieve sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse.
↗The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Pricesovercomingbias.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAt the mind level, the new moral authority that seems to best support these solutions is: speculative market prices.
↗The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Pricesovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
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Our reading
Human values are shaped mainly by culture rather than encoded in DNA, so they can change quickly.
Their wordsBut in fact, the values that we admire and cherish in folks around us are not mostly encoded in DNA.
↗AI Vs. Human Value Driftovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThat is, exactly the same process of value drift that people fear could cause AIs to want to kill all their ancestors could as plausibly cause humans to want to kill all their ancestors.
↗AI Vs. Human Value Driftovercomingbias.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI expect that neither consciousness nor moral truth tracking depends much on carbon vs silicon.
↗AI Vs. Human Value Driftovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
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Their wordsthere isn't a natural clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software.
↗AI Pause Regs Look Riskyovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsRegulation has worked best when it addresses concrete examples of things going bad, and worse when it is authorized to address vague and broad fears.
↗AI Pause Regs Look Riskyovercomingbias.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsRegulation also goes best when applied to stable worlds of tech and social arrangements, but badly when such arrangements could plausibly greatly change, as regulation tends to block such change.
↗AI Pause Regs Look Riskyovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
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Their wordsIf you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they are in conflict, in ways one or both fields are unaware.
- 3 months earlier
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Our reading
Decision markets are the idea of mine with the biggest expected impact, though not the deepest
Their wordsIt’s not my deepest, grandest, beautiful, or hardest won insight, just the one with the biggest expected impact.
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Their wordsAs an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance.
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsAnd they don’t see a need for a plan B, in case their forecast fails.
↗Five Fertility Failsovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThey do not want to give such enemies the satisfaction of admitting they have a point.
↗Five Fertility Failsovercomingbias.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsSimilarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.
↗Five Fertility Failsovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 months earlier
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Their wordsIts main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world.
↗A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsthe most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews
↗A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIt seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive.
↗A Fertility Reckoningovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 years earlier
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Their wordsIt seems to be correlated strongly with societal (not individual) wealth, and mediated by norms transmitted via mass media.