Robin Hanson+

Make Peace With Darwin

When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:

No-New-Physics Consciousness

There is a vast literature near the topic of this post, much of which has developed specialized vocabularies and concepts.

Digital Mind Suicide

Greg Egan’s 1994 novel Permutation City depicts digital minds having a right to suicide; if they push a particular internal button, they end.

Digital Mind Castes

Humans have two main relations to animals: they are either food or pets.

The Modern Mind's Fatal Flaw

Here’s a quick history of minds.

Easy To Hard Discipline Academic Careers Paths

Tasks often vary along a dimension where some tasks matter more, yet are also harder to judge for quality of performance.

How To Be A Usually-Right Contrarian

We rightly celebrate rebels who were initially contrarian on key claims, but then got the world to later agree with them.

Status And Social-Skill Bias

The following table gives medians of 3 LLM estimates re % relative importance for short term success in 5 areas of life of these 4 factors:

Why Sheep Need Pigs in Sheepdog’s Clothing

Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas.

Who Are Your "Descendants"?

On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when quite similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when quite different from you.

Our Likely Future Filter: World Govt

The great filter (a term I coined) is all the things that block simple dead matter from evolving into an advanced civilization easily seen from far away.

The End Of Culture

For years now, I’ve collected ideas for fixing cultural drift, and tried to judge which seem more promising.

200yrs of Reasons For World Govt

I asked Claude Fable 5 to, for each 25yr period starting in 1825, find the top 5 authors arguing for strong world governance, collect the top 3 reasons each offered, integrate those into a comparable set of reasons, and finally to graph how the importance of reasons changed over time:

LLM-judged policy debates

In many policy areas, the usual convention wisdom on policy is actually in substantial conflict with many of the specific details that experts know about that policy area.

Overly Smooth Drained Strict Costly Norms

Humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, which we had working long before language.

Callard's Uni-Context

A new conceptual tool for understanding the modern world just dropped:

This Time Is Always Different

Over the last few centuries the world has seen many huge changes.

Firm Inside Info Auctions

In the process of seeing and doing things, firm principals acquire “inside” info on the future value of their firm, and on the wisdom of particular firm decisions.

Why So Lucky In Weights?

The website InTheWeights.Com rates people on a 0-1000 scale re how well they are known by LLMs.

My Politics

Not sure why I didn’t notice before, but I’ve just realized that my key ask re cultural drift, namely let’s try to save cherished parts of our culture from being discarded by successor civs, violates key modern taboos!

AI Solution to Cultural Drift?

On reflection, I am now a bit more optimistic about solving cultural drift, *if* we can get broadly human-level AI, or ems, before our current civilization falls.

Beware Change-Blocking Priors

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” John Kenneth Galbraith

Sacred Identify

What is the sacred?

Overcoming Sincere Prestige Bias

Humans suffer two big but under-discussed biases, which together make us overly favor people we see as prestigious and sincere. First, humanity’s superpower is cultural evolution, wherein we copy each others’ behaviors, and this wouldn’t work if we copied from random others. So it couldn’t get going without our first big clue on who to copy: prestige. Which has become so entrenched that we greatly over-emphasize prestige even when better alternatives are now available.

Hanania On Populism

I liked Richard Hanania’s two prior books, but less like his new third one, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. (“Kakistocracy” means rule by the worst, least qualified, or most unprincipled.)

Our Eight Great Contests

Humanity has seen four great eras so far: animal, forager, farmer, and industry. And each era had two key levels of evolutionary competition: individual and group. This makes for eight great contests that have shaped our world.

Do Polymath LLMs Love Big Brother?

In Orwell’s novel 1984, protagonist Winston is beaten down by his totalitarian state, eventually so far into submission that he honestly embraces state claims that he has strong reasons to doubt, like 2+2=5.

Legible Forager Stories

To prevent dominators from taking over bands, early human foragers used language and weapons to empower a talky collective to coordinate to watch for and then punish moves toward such takeovers.

The Promise of Polymath LLMs

I have long associated with smart nerdy folks with broad interests, especially re tech/future.

Biotech Paper Game

Imagine a biotech firm that funds projects to develop new products, and typically bases their projects on one or more academic papers.