I recently asked on Twitter: When a problem is serious, and "something must be done", why do folks so often assume that it must be governments who do it? (more) Many of my 113 gave a similar answer. A sample: | Continue reading
Star formation peaked around 4Gyr after the Big Bang, Earth formed around 5.5Gyr later, and Earth is now 4.5Gyr old. The usual theory is that life arose within Earth’s first 0.4Gyr, but another possibility is that life first arose on a planet Eden around a star that formed … | Continue reading
We humans seem to have a general heuristic: be more wary of things that differ more from familiar things. In particular, we more distrust creatures who differ more from us; we are more inclined to ally against those who differ more, with those who differ less. In extreme cases, d … | Continue reading
A year ago I tried to come up with the most plausible story I could for why some UFOs might be aliens. In that story, life started long ago on some planet Eden, which then via panspermia seeded life onto thousands of planets in Earth’s stellar nursery. One of those other pl … | Continue reading
Louise Perry, author of “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution”, responds to Bryan Caplan’s book “Don’t be a feminist”. Perry summarizes Caplan well here I think: Caplan offers an elegant alternative, one that he believes actually describes th … | Continue reading
Though “discrimination” is a central theme of our modern world, it is closely connected to many other powerful related concepts. So we might wonder: what is the essential motive or passion driving attitudes and behaviors here? | Continue reading
There is a God–shaped vacuum in the heart of each man, which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ. Blaise Pascal. (more) In my recent efforts to study the sacred, I framed the question in this usual social sci … | Continue reading
The appreciate an AI future, consider a future without them. That is, imagine that we somehow manage to forever prevent any AIs who might take control of civilization. But also assume that our descendants continue to evolve competitively, with technical and economic growth for mi … | Continue reading
Most people assimilate the values of their local culture, some of which they can express abstractly, and mix that with their genetic personality and their individual experiences, and maybe also some thoughts, to produce the values they use to make decisions over their lifetimes. | Continue reading
YouGov America released a survey of 20,810 American adults. … 46% say that they are "very concerned" or "somewhat concerned" about the possibility that AI will cause the end of the human race on Earth … There do not seem to be meaningful differences by region, gender, … | Continue reading
Sam Quirk was ten years old. While on a field trip, his bus had paused at a rest stop, and Sam was sitting in a bathroom stall. From the next stall over, he heard clearly but quietly, “Sam Quirk, ask your parents about ‘royal propriety’”. By the time he co … | Continue reading
We humans have long preferred to associate with those who are similar to us. This make sense, as such associations tend to be more productive, both directly due to better matched context, tools, and expectations, and indirectly due to our more closely shared associates better enf … | Continue reading
While those of you who can read this have paid extra to subscribe to this blog, I have so far not offered you any extra benefit. So I now invite you to just come and talk to me on zoom this Friday afternoon 3-5p ET. Here is the link: https://gmu.zoom.us/j/96937017807?pwd=YmczNDM4 … | Continue reading
There have been over 100K UFO sightings reported worldwide since 1940. Roughly 5% or so are “strong” events, which seem rather hard to explain due to either many witnesses, especially reliable witnesses, physical evidence, or other factors. Many of these events are al … | Continue reading
Our definitions of social conditions X often embody unreasonably high demands for X, especially when the topic is “true X” . For example, definitions of “democracy” that go beyond merely requiring that some particular process be followed often go crazy add … | Continue reading
Compared to some, I am less worried about extreme near-term AI doom scenarios. But I also don’t like policy being sensitive to my or anyone else’s risk estimates. I instead prefer robust policies, ones we can expect to promote total welfare for a wide range of paramet … | Continue reading
Capitalism is the engine of our world; more than anything else, it is what has made us rich over the last few centuries. It is not just that we are free to trade stuff at market prices. It is also that we have teams who bet huge chunks of capital on risky ventures that attempt bi … | Continue reading
Yesterday I did a set of nine Twitter polls, each time asking respondents on which side of particular divide (e.g. tall vs short) they fell, and if they try to favor their side of this divide. This table shows the % on each side, and what fraction of each side said they try to fa … | Continue reading
Having hung around futurists and their audiences for four decades now I can tell you this: while most people are usually vaguely optimistic about the future, they change their minds fast when shown non-near futures described in plausible detail. (E.g., | Continue reading
We typically deter crime via a chance of punishment. Someone who commits a crime might get found out, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced. So the amount of deterrence should increase with the chance of that sentence give committing a crime, with the size of the punishment implie … | Continue reading
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, I have yet to motivate any of them to actually pursue this response. L … | Continue reading
You exist now, with some health, wealth, and connections, and you therefore have some influence. You might use this influence for immediate personal gain, or you might try to influence a wider universe, including a distant future. And to the extent that you influence a wider univ … | Continue reading
Most orgs have a pre-review process to edit and approve high-level text sent to a wide org scope, such as to the public or to distant orgs. Legal, PR, and other sub-orgs get to weigh in on how to avoid: legal liability, making unintended promises, giving offense, suggesting disli … | Continue reading
This is an excellent 2014 book on how men differ from women: In Warriors and Worriers, psychologist Joyce Benenson presents a new theory of sex differences, based on thirty years of research with young children and primates around the world. … boys and men deter their enemi … | Continue reading
In 2011, law prof Leo Katz published an interesting book, Why The Law is Perverse. Katz first lists many ways that the law is perverse, especially rulings that reject win-win (i.e., “Pareto improvement”) changes, wherein some gain and none lose. Then Katz attributes t … | Continue reading
What I’m about to say is pretty obvious to most artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, but I think others might benefit from hearing it. In general, AI systems are created by combining computer hardware, other hardware, access to data, an architecture, parameter settings … | Continue reading
Consider this iconic seduction scene from '58 movie The Lovers, from 58:55 on. It is dark, quiet, behind a large house at night. Jeanne walks past Bernard, not seeing him. B follows quietly, approaches, J is startled to see him. B: It’s You. [J says nothing, walks away, after 14s … | Continue reading
From 2nd grade on my family lived in Southern California, and so we went to visit Disneyland about once a year during my childhood, trips that I greatly enjoyed. So Disneyland would be sacred to me because of that alone. But it also seems relatively sacred to many others. For exa … | Continue reading
According to Durkheim (and me), humans prefer to bind together not so much by directly and explicitly valuing each other, but instead indirectly, by choosing something “sacred” outside ourselves to see the same together (and different from the view in other groups). | Continue reading
Some people think that number of publications or citations, weighted by venue prestige, is an adequate measure of one key kind of academic productivity. To such people, tenure looks inefficient. Why not just pay academics per output? Sure an institution might invest in someone be … | Continue reading
I got my PhD in formal political theory from Caltech in 1997. And here I’m going to pull rank, invoking my expertise on democracy. Our society is heavily regulated, especially its most prestigious and important parts. And much of that regulation gives regulators great discretion, … | Continue reading
I (Robin Hanson) have signed this statement, and am posting it simultaneously with three of my colleagues, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, and Don Boudreaux. Statement of Commitment to Academic Freedom and to Intellectual Merit Addressed to the George Mason University (GMU) communit … | Continue reading
Construal level theory says that we think more concretely, as opposed to abstractly, about things that seem nearer to us in space, time, sociality, chance, and plan. Such concrete thinking can reveal itself, for example, in our using more concrete words as descriptors. | Continue reading
Large language models like ChatGPT have recently spooked a great many, and my Twitter feed is full of worriers saying how irresponsible orgs have been to make and release such models. Because, they say, such a system might have killed us all. And, as some researchers say that the … | Continue reading
Over time I’ve come to feel forced to conclude that that most people want large areas of life to be relative free of law. That is, they don’t want to allow legal complaints about harms in those areas. They instead want other social institutions to handle such harms, o … | Continue reading
Tim Urban has a new book, What’s Our Problem?, whose main thesis is that our minds have two modes, and high and a low mind. The high mind more seeks truth, while the low mind more seeks loyalty via confirming sacred beliefs. The high mind thinks like a scientist, especially in an … | Continue reading
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Imagine that our galaxy was filled with billions of civs, but also that a) interstellar travel was impossible, b) interstellar messaging was slow but cheap, and c) at great expense, civs could send bombs to hurt e … | Continue reading
In the last few days, I’ve dived down a rabbit hole inspired by some new astrophysics papers suggesting that dark energy is actually black holes. I think I get it now. So let me explain. The universe is expanding, and instead of that expansion decelerating as was expected, we fou … | Continue reading
The world is full of ambitious middle managers seeking to brand themselves as “innovative”, or maybe even “visionary”. You might think their strategy would be to use personal experience to collect promising innovation ideas over the course of their careers … | Continue reading
While I’m innovative in some ways, in many other ways I lag behind. That is certainly true for clothes, music, and furnishings. And it took me ever so long to admit that a smartphone was a good idea. And as I started blogging in 2006 at an independent website, perhaps you c … | Continue reading
There are some famous “honeypot” topics that suck in many people, but where few make any progress. I usually avoid them. But I was recently pulled into discussing “consciousness”, and realized I do have something new to say about that. New to me that is; I … | Continue reading
The following are 45 correlates that I’ve collected of things called “sacred”. I invite any of you to offer a theory of the sacred that explains as many of these as you can, as simply as you can. (And to suggests edits of this list.) Sacred things are highly (or … | Continue reading
Upon seeing the adult world in detail, teens often lament “But it’s all so boring!” And in a standard trope of fiction, a spark of art infuses life, energy, and vitality into dull adults whose lives have lost all meaning. (E.g. recent movie Living.) Both groups … | Continue reading
FYI, this working paper summarizes my new account of the sacred. By making X sacred, a group can bind together around their shared view of X, motivate their members, and divert more energy toward X. But this comes at the cost of inducing costly signals of sacrifice for X, and ind … | Continue reading
Longtermism is an ethical stance which gives priority to improving the long-term future. (More) Recently some have criticized longtermism, saying that it is often quite hard to have much confidence in how our acts today effect the distant future. Others have noted that it is also … | Continue reading
A senior high quality person, who I trust, who recently spent several years trying to promote prediction markets, reports the following relevant quotes: A G7 government official and advisor to their head of state: “The prediction market experiment was a success, but we will not p … | Continue reading
I’m here today at one of those moments where I feel I see an insight, but an insight which I suspect that many others already knew, and have long been trying to explain to me. If you are one of those, I apologize for my thickness. The insight is this: many of our major policy cho … | Continue reading
The most common argument I hear offered against allowing more immigration is that immigrants will compete with natives in local markets, including labor, mating, and housing markets. But economists understand that in competitive markets any benefits that natives gain from restric … | Continue reading