Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson's Opinions

Computers Do Gödellian arguments refute a computational model of the mind? Disagree Reviewers [of Penrose] knowledgeable about Godel's work ... have simply pointed out that an axiom system can infer that if its axioms are self-consistent, then its Godel sentence is true. An axiom system just can't determine its own self-consistency. But then neither can human mathematicians know whether the axioms they explicitly favor (much less the axioms they are formally equivalent to) are self-consistent. Cantor and Frege's proposed axioms of set theory turned out to be inconsistent... Edit Pitches 01 Jan 1991    Source Could a computer ever be conscious? Agree Bryan Caplan and I recently discussed if brain emulations “feel.” In such discussions, many prefer to wait-and-see, saying folks with strong views are prematurely confident. Surely future researchers will have far more evidence, right? Actually, no; we already know pretty much everything relevant we are ever going to know about what really “feels”. ... Edit Pitches 04 Dec 2009    Source Extraterrestrial Life Is intelligent extraterrestrial life common in our galaxy? Mostly Disagree No alien civilizations have substantially colonized our solar system or systems nearby. Thus among the billion trillion stars in our past universe, none has reached the level of technology and growth that we may soon reach. This one data point implies that a Great Filter stands between ordinary dead matter and advanced exploding lasting life. And the big question is: How far along this filter are we? Edit Pitches 15 Sep 1998    Source Have aliens from outer space visited Earth? Mostly Disagree Since the universe is thirteen billion years old while human civilization is only a few thousand years old, alien civilizations out there would most likely be millions and perhaps billions of years more advanced than us. Given such a lead, it is quite plausible they could make devices able to display all of the phenomena reported for UFOs. There is nothing in physics that suggests UFOs are not aliens. No, the main argument against UFOs as aliens is that this is an implausible social scenario. Edit Pitches 20 Aug 2008    Source Evolution Is humanity likely doomed to destroy itself? Neutral Humanity seems to have a bright future, i.e., a non-trivial chance of expanding to fill the universe with lasting life. But the fact that space near us seems dead now tells us that any given piece of dead matter faces an astronomically low chance of begating such a future. There thus exists a great filter between death and expanding lasting life, and humanity faces the ominous question: how far along this filter are we? Edit Pitches 15 Sep 1998    Source Is status seeking a good explanation for much of our behavior? Agree For me, [stories of evolutionary psychology, status seeking, and various versions of sociology] have been the biggest revelations of my life... I never thought very consciously to achieve status and make babies and try to get other people to submit to my dominance and things like that. That never entered my conscious thoughts but when I look back on my behavior I have to say these theories account reasonably well for my behavior and other people's behavior and that's really quite shocking. Edit Pitches 06 Jul 2008    Source Is monogamy natural for humans? Disagree It seems that our distant forager ancestors ... weren’t remotely monogamous. ... Polygamy is always allowed and usually socially preferred. Co-wives either live together or one lives with a husband while the rest live in entirely different bands. On average, about 35% of men have more than one wife, and 50% of women are in a polygamous marriage (vs. 3% and 7% in modern societies). Edit Pitches 08 Jun 2010    Source Ethics Is it ethical to eat meat? Agree ...is it good to create people that will eventually die? We usually say yes, if their lives are "worth living" overall. That is, if they get value out of being alive, and are not in a situation like severe torture, where they would rather be dead than alive. ...most farm animal's lives are worth living... they do not want to commit suicide. ... [Therefore] buying [meat] rather than asparagus, is good; you create farm animals whose lives are worth living. Edit Pitches 10 Jul 2002    Source Is cryonics worthwhile? Agree More likely than not, most folks who die today didn't have to die! ... Since most folks who die today have an intact brain until the rest of their body fails them, more likely than not most death victims today could live on as (one or more) future [brain emulations on a computer]. And if future folks learn to repair freezing damage plus whatever was killing victims, victims might live on as ordinary humans. Edit Pitches 12 Dec 2008    Source Is "ought" derived from "is"? Mostly Agree ...there is an important sense in which most attempts to derive “ought” are built on “is.” ... most every attempt to derive an “ought” is based ultimately on “is” claims about the reliability of our intuitions about such more basic “ought” claims. If we can’t find a coherent way to integrate these “is” claims with the rest of our network of reasonable “is” claims, then we can’t argue coherently for such “ought” claims at all. Edit Pitches 12 Dec 2009    Source Is hypocrisy acceptable? Agree ...pause for a moment and ask: how sure can you be that your inborn ideals are really better than the ideals society wishes to imprint on you? Your inborn ideals were adaptive to a world that is long gone, and only then in conjunction with lots of hypocrisy; the ideals adults want to imprint on you instead seem better adapted to your current world. There is no solid rock on which you can stand; we all float in a sea of choice; choose your ideals, and your level of hypocrisy, and pay the price. Edit Pitches 12 Jun 2010    Source Education Is creativity overrated? Agree ...much of the hoopla over creativity is a crock. Why? Because we are already up to our eyeballs in it. Make no mistake: Innovation matters. Nothing is more essential for long-term economic growth. But to get more innovation we may want less, not more, creativity. ... In truth, we don't need more suggestion boxes or more street mimes to fill people with a spirit of creativity. We instead need to better manage the flood of ideas we already have and to reward managers for actually executing them. Edit Pitches 03 Jul 2006    Source Is not bothering to vote acceptable? Agree No, having as many people as possible voting is not a legitimate public interest. To maximize the chance that we elect the better candidate, we do not want people to vote if they are so ill-informed that by voting they will decrease this chance. And even if someone’s vote would increase this chance, if the increase is infinitesimal the fact that voting is costly can make us prefer he or she just stay home. The Paternal Pitch   Edit Pitches 09 Oct 2008    Source Economics Does minimum wage help the poor? Mostly Disagree Regarding our best estimate of the employment effect of a small min wage rise, while many have recently said this is near zero, more say it is substantially negative, and I have asked around and found *no* economist who says that it is substantially positive. Thus, I conclude, any reasonable average of these estimates must be negative, and has been so for a while. The Consensus Pitch   Edit Pitches 05 Dec 2006    Source Is efficient market theory the best approximation of the truth for the average investor? Mostly Agree ...variations on the Efficient Markets Hypothesis [depend] on what info counts as “available.” Weak versions only count very widely and easily available info, while strong versions even count info available with difficulty to only a few. The strongest possible forms are silly, and no one ever believed them. Weak versions, which require info to be available to many deep-pocket market speculators, are much more plausible, and I don’t see recent history as offering much evidence against them. Edit Pitches 20 Jul 2009    Source Are prediction markets the most accurate way to aggregate expert predictions? Agree I tried to put prediction markets (and similar mechanisms) in the context of other approaches by saying that other approaches often work very well when either the info people contribute is verifiable, or the conclusions people draw are uncontroversial. ... The big problems for most collective intelligence tools come when the topics are controversial, and the contributions involve a lot of judgment. ... Prediction markets were designed exactly these sort of hard problems... Edit Pitches 04 Sep 2009    Source Would the typical entrepreneur be better off as an employee? Agree Don’t worry [entrepreneurs], you are the exception; none of these rules [that successful entrepreneurs follow] apply to your business. The Sarcastic Pitch   Edit Pitches 27 Jan 2010    Source

Health Could rising health and retirement costs bankrupt the US? Neutral If the world stays relatively boring, this will be the biggest US politics issue over the next twenty years. The key questions are: 1) Who will pay: raise taxes, limit treatments covered, tax docs, or cut off the richer & younger? 2) Who will be blamed: docs, the old, the young, the rich, the poor, Republicans, Democrats, corporations, immigrants, foreigners? Edit Pitches 11 May 2007    Source Does smoking cause cancer? Neutral So we don’t have clear evidence that smoking kills; it could be that most or all of the death-smoking correlations are due to selection effects, and not smoking causing death. ... Apparently we need bigger trials if we are going to see clearly if smoking kills. Alas the era of the large risk trial seems to be over, at least for now; it seems it will be a long time before we really know. The Tenuous Evidence Pitch   The Cause vs Correlation Pitch   Edit Pitches 14 Dec 2009    Source Is moderate alcohol consumption detrimental to your health? Disagree The US FDA prohibits the alcohol industry from advertising these studies, showing the health benefits of alcohol, because the public might get the wrong impression. You do not have free speech in the US regarding health. Edit Pitches 02 Sep 2010    Source Democracy Is democracy the best form of government? Mostly Disagree Democracy today suffers from enormous errors regarding estimates of policy consequences, i.e., of passing particular bills. Voters have serious illusions and misconceptions that sway their minds on election day, when they have little expertize and only mild motivations to attend to their task. Candidates have strong expertize and incentives to attend to their task, but that task is largely to pander to voter illusions. The Mob Pitch   Edit Pitches 01 Feb 2008    Source Is democracy inevitable? Disagree The world has emulated Western policies mainly because those nations were high status, not because their style of law or government was obviously more efficient. Chinese styles are likely similarly efficient, and if China becomes higher status, the world will emulate it instead. Edit Pitches 20 Dec 2009    Source Artificial Intelligence Is a technological singularity likely? Mostly Agree ...the economy that awaits our grandchildren [I expect] to follow a societal discontinuity more dramatic than those brought on by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. ... [The arrival of machine intelligence on a human level] could produce a singularity--an overwhelming departure from prior trends, with uneven and dizzyingly rapid change thereafter. A future shock to end future shocks. Edit Pitches 01 Jun 2008    Source Global Warming Is climate engineering a good strategy to combat global warming? Agree For a few $B/yr or less we take a tiny fraction of the SO2 humans already emit and put it way up in the stratosphere, e.g., via Naval guns, where it blocks sunlight. ... There are risks from changing economies as well as from changing stratospheres, and we understand the latter far better than the former. If we cared more about global warming than symbolic gestures for planetary purity, we’d likely accept the risks and start artificial volcanoes as soon as we thought warming was hurting us. Edit Pitches 08 Jul 2008    Source Does Cap and Trade beat carbon tax for reducing emissions? Disagree A carbon tax would make price blame clearer, so [Democrats] are going with tradable permits, which also lets them play more favorites with who gets permits. Permits also make it harder to notice if they actually cut carbon, vs. preserving business as usual. Edit Pitches 16 Jun 2009    Source Happiness Is self-deception a fault? Mostly Agree Evolution judged that [having] misleading beliefs would tend to help us fool our colleagues, and so better survive and reproduce. It created subconscious mental processes to manage this process of deciding when our beliefs should be accurate or misleading. ... Many folks figure that if evolution planned for them to believe a lie, they might as well believe a lie; that probably helps them achieve their goals. But I want, first and foremost, to believe the truth. Edit Pitches 15 Jun 2009    Source Is optimism rational? Mostly Agree We are naturally happy when times are good and sad when times are bad. Since we prefer to associate with folks having good times, we prefer associates who act happy. So we tend to be biased to act happier than our hidden info about our circumstances justifies. Of course when things go really bad we may switched to acting depressed, to realistically assess our prospects, and to perhaps induce more assistance. Edit Pitches 21 Nov 2009    Source Philosophy Is scientific consensus relevant? Mostly Agree On average, contrarian views are less accurate than standard views. Honest contrarians should admit this, that neutral outsiders should assign most contrarian views a lower probability than standard views, though perhaps a high enough probability to warrant further investigation. Honest contrarians who expect reasonable outsiders to give their contrarian view more than normal credence should point to strong outside indicators that correlate enough with contrarians tending more to be right. Edit Pitches 15 Nov 2009    Source

Comparisons with Other Experts and Influencers

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Conforming Opinions

Robin Hanson's conforming opinions are opinions that align with the group of experts and influencers Robin Hanson typically agrees with.

Nonconforming Opinions

Robin Hanson's nonconforming opinions are opinions that contradict the group of experts and influencers Robin Hanson typically agrees with.

Projected Opinions

Robin Hanson's projected opinions are opinions Robin Hanson is expected to have if their opinions align with the experts and influencers that they typically agree with.