Robin Hanson

@robin-hanson · 22 positions · On ppll ↗

Associate professor of economics at George Mason University, originator of decision markets and futarchy, and author of the blog Overcoming Bias.

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What Robin Hanson says most about

demographics 7

Expecting AI or longer lives to arrive in time makes people skip having a plan for falling birth rates at all.
Paying parents large sums of cash directly is the pronatal policy most likely to work, because every indirect policy has to guess what the real obstacle is.

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government 4

Regulation works best when it targets concrete, identified harms and worst when it is authorized to address vague, broad fears.
Regulation works well in stable conditions of technology and social arrangements but poorly when those arrangements are likely to change greatly.

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capitalism 3

The modern era broke humanity's traditional process for evolving cultures by creating a fast-changing, capitalism-driven world while keeping capitalism from running many key areas of culture.
Cultural drift can be managed by letting capitalism run everything and using prediction markets to track a group's adaptive success and progress toward achieving key goals.

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AI alignment 2

The same value-drift process that could make AI want to kill all humans could equally make future human generations want to kill their ancestors.
AIs, like children raised in a culture, can eventually be guided through teaching to join civilization rather than requiring permanent control.

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behavioural science 2

Treating a group harshly as though they are barbarians can cause them to act like barbarians, at least temporarily.
Human values are shaped mainly by culture rather than encoded in DNA, so they can change quickly.

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