Robin Hanson: The standard view is certainly that we can see very little effect on the margin of more spending on medicine, on health, and certainly the standard view that we see a lot of other things that are much bigger.
I did a Cato Unbound forum about 10 years ago where my starting essay was cut medicine in half, and a number of prominent health economists responded there. None of them disagreed with my basic factual claims about the correlation of health and medicine and other things, but, still, many of them were reluctant to give up on many medicine. They said, “Well, yes, on average, it doesn’t help, but some of it must be useful and, uh, we shouldn’t cut anything until we figure out what the useful parts are,” and I make the analogy of that with a monkey trap.
In many parts of the world, there are monkeys that run around, and you might want to eat one. To do that, you need to trap one, and a common way to trap a monkey is you take a gourd, that is, a big container that’s empty, and you put a nut on the inside of that gourd, and the monkey will reach into the gourd and put his fist around the nut and try to pull his hand out because then mouth is too small to get his hand up, and he will not let go of that nut.
Robert Wiblin: Is that actually true? That’s just not a metaphor? That’s literally true?
Robin Hanson: Yes, he will in fact get caught and eaten because he will not be willing to let go of that nut, and this is a way to trap and eat a monkey. Now, I don’t know, I think this is how Curious George was caught, but it could have been, so this is a sad thing basically if you won’t let go of that nut, but I think that’s also true.
My colleague, Bryan Caplan, again, at the moment, has his book, The Case Against Education, and he’s getting a similar response. People tend to agree with him, “Yes, we don’t learn very much. There’s not much actual, uh, learning going on in the school or we don’t remember very much of it,” and he says, “Well, let’s cut the education allotment,” and they say, “No. No. No. Uh, let’s, you know, wait until we can figure out what parts are useful and, and, you know, focus more on those, but we shouldn’t cut anything,” which, again, I think would be the monkey trap.
I don’t think it’s proper to present something as a literal quotation when you have changed its content.
(I saw all those “zir”s and “ze”s and thought “That seems very un-Robin-Hanson-like” and checked, and indeed RH used “he” and “his” throughout. It may well be that it would be better if RH had used gender-neutral pronouns, but as it happens he didn’t, and you shouldn’t “correct” that and still present the resulting modified text as a quotation.)
ah, I definitely agree yes, thank you for pointing that out. it was a quote I took from old notes back when I had a browser extension that would automatically change all pronouns to gender neutral pronouns, and I didn’t know at the time I would share that quote publicly, which is the source of the error. I fixed it.
It could be worse. There was (I guess still is) a famous browser extension that replaces every instance of “cloud” with “butt” as a way of making fun of the fad for doing computing things “in the cloud”. Some people have had … unfortunate experiences with that one.
I feel this could be turned into a fable:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/robin-hanson-on-lying-to-ourselves/#transcript
I don’t think it’s proper to present something as a literal quotation when you have changed its content.
(I saw all those “zir”s and “ze”s and thought “That seems very un-Robin-Hanson-like” and checked, and indeed RH used “he” and “his” throughout. It may well be that it would be better if RH had used gender-neutral pronouns, but as it happens he didn’t, and you shouldn’t “correct” that and still present the resulting modified text as a quotation.)
ah, I definitely agree yes, thank you for pointing that out. it was a quote I took from old notes back when I had a browser extension that would automatically change all pronouns to gender neutral pronouns, and I didn’t know at the time I would share that quote publicly, which is the source of the error. I fixed it.
Ah, I see.
It could be worse. There was (I guess still is) a famous browser extension that replaces every instance of “cloud” with “butt” as a way of making fun of the fad for doing computing things “in the cloud”. Some people have had … unfortunate experiences with that one.
Hanson:
OTOH, Chesterton’s fence.
The literal monkey trap is probably a myth.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mikepalma.wordpress.com/2010/09/22/spider-monkey-syndrome-reality-or-myth/amp/