Robin Hanson

Why Don’t Gamers Win At Life? Last weekend I attended Bryan Caplan’s annual board game weekend CaplaCon, as I have since ‘07.

Key norms say to NOT make key life choices conscious/strategically. Very good gamers are tempted to defy such norms, which tends to go badly. If they don't defy, being good at gaming doesn't help them so much. Which is why great gamers don't win at life. www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-dont-g...

The literature on first-impressions & late-bloomers explains them as good heuristics or cognitive biases, but misses the obvious social explanation: we are judged on how consistent our judgements of others are with the judgements of well-judged others. www.overcomingbias.com/p/why-first-...

Some say fertility problem was caused by culture, so must be solved by culture, eg, religion, shunning, stories, art, & exemplary lives, NOT via money incentives. But in history of capitalism, material gains have often driven big cultural changes. www.overcomingbias.com/p/we-can-buy...

Now that we think world will long decline until rise of insular fertile subcultures, we should find a way to recalibrate our respect to rate their features very highly, & the many fertility-resisting features of mainstream culture far more lowly. www.overcomingbias.com/p/recalibrat...

Rational beliefs should depend on the SET of evidence available, but not on the ORDER in which one learned of it. This is violated when we accept claims we were taught when young, even though we learn that other young folks were taught opposing claims. www.overcomingbias.com/p/evidence-o...

There is a conflict between seeing moral claims as truths that apply to all times & places, and largely accepting the moral claims that your culture taught you, when you know that other cultures teach different claims. www.overcomingbias.com/p/choose-cul...

"Instead of eagerly seeking to join a new expanding world of software, [firms] would be looking to escape their reliance on software, for fear of increasingly hungry and bitey software suppliers bleeding them to death." www.overcomingbias.com/p/after-eati...

There is a conflict between seeing moral claims as truths that apply to all times & places, and largely accepting the moral claims that your culture taught you, when you know that other cultures teach different claims. www.overcomingbias.com/p/choose-cul...

Amish-like insular fertile subcultures likely take over world in a few centuries, & throw away many things precious to us. We should work to identify stuff we value that they could value, & separate & simplify so these our new overlords will accept them. www.overcomingbias.com/p/bow-to-our...

There's a sense in which the hard SF world view was my first world view. I've layered that with lots more subtlety and understanding from my polymathic explorations, but my core isn't buried that deep underneath.

"political aura that went with the hard-SF style … was of ornery & insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering & a rock-ribbed empiricism that valued knowing how things work & treated all political ideologizing with suspicion"

We humans consistently fail to correct for selection effects. Which could make people want to copy the low fertility behavior of the rich parents of the most successful folks they see. www.overcomingbias.com/p/fertility-...

Or they they wouldn’t believe your words. Eg a squirrel.

Robots-Took-Most-Jobs Insurance I’ve long described the following as the most obviously helpful policy response to the possibility of advanced AI. But even though I’ve long known many folks who say they are very worried about AI...

IMO a really underrated Robin Hanson idea: insurance that pays out when some condition that approximates "robots took most jobs" is triggered.

It can also be done at gov-level: gov buys securities that pay out {1 year of GDP} once the "robots take most jobs" condition is triggered.