Robin Hanson
@robinhanson
788 Following 127.6K Followers
Consider hiring Charles as an economist:
You don't hear much defense of liberalism these days, until you hear folks explicitly propose strikingly non-liberal governance. Then, the knives come out.
Great review of our book. Really engaged with our work critically.
Cryopreservation of aldehyde-fixed whole brains
So why doesn't this logic apply to entering any space, if you knew that risks which happen there were associated with it?
JUST IN: Elon Musk says "no crying in the casino" after Broadcom CEO compares AI investors to gamblers
"rejected … because 'there is no new mathematics'. … distort the direction of the field to look more mathematical. … I wonder if this attitude will change now that doing hard math has become commoditized." Good question.
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Over the past 10 years, I have submitted very few papers to journals.
Every once in a while I submit just to test if the peer review system is still as broken as I remember.
From earlier this week. I submitted an article on an application of probability in betting.
I know for a fact this is actually a useful application that is used in the real world. Which is also why I knew it would be rejected almost immediately -- because why would a real world application be of interest to an academic journal on applied probability?
As expected, it was rejected from the Annals of Applied Probability because "there is no new mathematics".
A lot of fields, and especially probability, have long had "math envy", so they distort the direction of the field to look more mathematical. (See analytic philosophy for the best example.)
I wonder if this attitude will change now that doing hard math has become commoditized.
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Good job, AIs.
Another prizewinner, and once again Pangram flags almost the entire story as AI-generated.
"So Hanson is almost the purest case of: Pessimistic propositions without pessimistic affect. … detached long-run pessimism, not neutrality."
(A) Averaging over times & places over last 5Kyrs, have most social trends been negative?
(B) Are most social trends negative here and now?
Double trouble -- our peer-reviewed machine learning/transient paper has also just been published. This is where we clean up the sample and see that the fewer contaminants there are, the stronger the correlation with nukes and the larger the shadow deficit. It also shows that the correlations with nukes is strongest 24 hours before a nuclear test.
Link:
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No, savings is invested in growing the economy.
“median individual with more than $500,000 in savings had, 20 years into retirement, spent just 12% of that sum. … U.S. economy suffers as all of that money sits under the proverbial mattress instead of being spent.”
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New interview with @robinhanson !
We talk about why Robin doesn't expect strong RSI, why he expects AIs to undergo cultural evolution, and how he thinks about values in the very long run.
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What % of actual social trends are positive?
Why do most people see most social trends as negative?
(A) Personal/media bias focus on negative
(B) Wrong/bad people control stuff, make it go bad
(C) Its part of civ rise/fall cycle when things go bad
(D) We broke our superpower of cultural evolution
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Of the social trends that you hear about, what % seem positive?
Most political alliances are bound together by many specific positions, not abstract principles. Allowing the abstractions to change as specific positions and alliances change. Intellectuals may be bothered by this, but have little influence.
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A laudable left-liberal impulse toward inclusion became a vehicle for all kinds of deeply illiberal anti-individualistic identity politics concepts to enter mainstream Democratic politics.
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"It’s not entirely that young people have fewer social opportunities, but that they are encouraged to prioritize their own personal experiences and expression. On social media, self-optimization culture teaches young people that the most coveted rewards in life are secured through individual effort and ambition alone. There is a fear that our relational obligations can work against these goals by restricting our autonomy. It explains why more young people worry about what marriage and parenthood will require of them, rather than the benefits they offer."
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When I surveyed my colleagues on the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard for examples of how a lack of intellectual and political diversity was distorting scholarship & teaching in their fields, 1 example was avoidance of mentioning one of the most robust findings in happiness research: "Married people are happier. Period." | Why Americans Stopped Falling in Love.
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"non-altruistic individuals transfer to individuals with smaller allocations to protect themselves from harmful consequences, creating selfish equality. … selfish equality accounts for substantially more cross-country variation in societal redistribution than altruistic giving or any other leading alternative explanation"
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"Opposing comments increase reactions, comments, and link clicks by 15-43% relative to no comments, whereas supportive comments have little effect."
"Among married women, a one-standard-deviation increase in teleworkability reduced annual birth rates by 2% … no statistically significant effects on fertility among men or unmarried women, or on marriage or divorce"
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