Part 1: Our Thinking
Near and Far
1 Abstract/Distant Future Bias
2 Abstractly Ideal, Concretely Selfish
4 Why We Don’t Know What We Want
5 We See the Sacred from Afar, to See It Together
Disagreement
9 Are Meta Views Outside Views?
10 Disagreement Is Near-Far Bias
14 Rationality Requires Common Priors
15 Might Disagreement Fade Like Violence?
Biases
Part 2: Our Motives
Signaling
23 Decision Theory Remains Neglected
25 Politics isn’t about Policy
30 Errors, Lies, and Self-Deception
Norms
31 Enforce Common Norms On Elites
33 Exclusion As A Substitute For Norms, Law, & Governance
37 10 Implications of Automatic Norms
39 Automatic Norms in Academia
Fiction
The Dreamtime
48 DreamTime
50 We Moderns Are Status-Drunk
Part 3: Our Institutions
Prediction Markets
53 Prediction Markets “Fail” To Mooch
54 Seeking Robust Credible Expertise Buyers
55 Prediction Markets Need Trial and Error
56 New-Hire Prediction Markets
Academia
59 Fixing Academia Via Prediction Markets
60 Intellectual Prestige Futures
61 Academic Stats Prediction Markets
62 How To Fund Prestige Science
Medicine
Paternalism
65 Paternalism Is About Status
66 Rulesy Folks Push Paternalism
Law
72 Conditional Harberger Tax Games
73 Reliable Private-Enough Physical Identity
75 Quality Regs Say ‘High Is Good’
76 Socialism: A Gift You’d Exchange?
77 Vouch For Pandemic Passports
78 Can We Tame Political Minds?
81 Privately Enforced & Punished Crime
82 Fine Grain Futarchy Zoning Via Harberger Taxes
Part 4: Our Past
Farmers and Foragers
86 Forager v Farmer, Elaborated
History as Exponential Modes
93 The Labor-From-Factories Explosion
94 Lost Advanced Civilizations
The Great Filter
95 Try-Try or Try-Once Great Filter?
96 Great Filter with Set-Backs, Dead-Ends
97 Seeing ANYTHING Other Than Huge-Civ Is Bad News
98 Our Level in the Great Filter
100 Fertility: The Big Problem
Part 5: Our Future
Aliens
101 Humans Are Early
104 Why We Can’t See Grabby Aliens
105 Beware General Visible Near Prey
UFOs
111 Explaining Stylized UFO Facts
The Age of Em
114 How Does Brain Code Differ?
115 Progeny Probabilities: Souls, Ems, Quantum
Artificial Intelligence
117 A.I. Old-Timers
121 Foom Justifies AI Risk Efforts Now
124 An Outside View of AI Control
125 AI Risk, Again
Very good! Hoping to see—weakly intending to commit—a post list of his latest boom (fertility decline, which lead him to culture). I attended one of Robin’s Zoom meetings on culture, and I’m confident it is on par with his other great fixations thus far (prediction markets, signaling, ems and aliens) if not even bigger. Robin seems absolutely possessed by the phenomenon.
For those who do not follow him: Robin has begun seeing culture as broken/maladaptive, and he seems to think this is perhaps the key issue of our time, on par or bigger than climate change and AI. He thinks that cultural change is driven into directions which will eventually lead to population decline and nasty places, even though he remains optimistic on our species’ future in the long run.
Could you clarify a bit here. Is Hanson talking about specific cultures or all of the instances of culture?
Hanson seems to treat the global civilization as a cultural melting pot, but he does distinguish insular subcultures from that. I intuit he sees contemporary cultures on a gradient relative to global, hegemonic trends (which correlate with technological progress, increasing wealth and education) and thereby drifting pressures.
Are you aware of anyone else working on the same topic?
This is not novel to Hanson, it’s been a staple of (neo)reactionary /conservative thought for millenia.
I wouldn’t equate Robin’s perspectives on culture with reactionary movements or conservatism. If anything, he seems quite open to radical transformations of society (e.g. futarchy to replace parlamentarism, bounty systems and vouching to replace policing, private insurance policies to replace welfare policies etc.).
Whereas (neo-)reactionary / conservative thought simply often intends to return some previous status quo, Robin does not confess to representing such views and has not proposed such solutions. In fact, as far as I’m aware he hasn’t proposed any solutions at all as of yet.
I have converted the anthology into an audio format using the default (and terrible) AWS AI voice (mostly for my own consumption): https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fabien368/episodes/Overcoming-bias-anthology—our-thinking-e2q61mg
Typo: It’s Prediction Markets “Fail” To *Mooch (not Moloch)
lol fixed thanks
Is this related to the bounty, or a separate project?
Yeah it’s for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.
I notice that there’s just shy of 128 here and they’re mostly pretty short, so you can start the day by flipping a coin 7 times to decide which one to read. Not a bisection search, just convert the seven flips to binary and pick the corresponding number. At first, you only have to start over and do another 7 flips if you land on 1111110 (126), 1111111 (127), or 0000000 (128).
If you drink coffee in the morning, this is a way better way to start the day than social media, as the early phase of the stimulant effect reinforces behavior in most people. Hanson’s approach to various topics is a good mentality to try boosting this way.
How difficult would it be to turn this into an epub or pdf? Is there word of that coming soon? (or integrating into LW like the Codex?)