Robin Hanson
About
Economist colleague of Cowen who worries about too-low population
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No topic-region cast yet — this appears once Robin Hanson's compiled claims are aligned into a topic region's argument tree.
Claims by Robin Hanson (20 of 146)
Religion Bonds Through Costly Strange Beliefs
A standard social-science explanation of religion is that agreeing to unusual rituals and believing strange things functions to convince co-believers that you are bound to them and that leaving would be costly, making the group feel they can rely on you — i.e. the costly, weird commitments are loyalty-bonding mechanisms, regardless of what's in believers' heads.
Dominance Versus Prestige Status
Humans have two distinct kinds of status that we suspiciously tend to merge: dominance (power over someone) and prestige (earned respect). The distinction shows in eye behavior — you avoid the eyes of someone with dominance over you (eye contact signals defiance) but are supposed to look at someone with prestige. People want prestige and will admit to accepting it but not to seeking it, and won't admit to submitting to dominance, which is how people make peace with their bosses ('he's earned that role') versus condemning other societies' tyrants.
We Won't Admit We Need Incentives
Many of the world's problems persist because we have insufficient incentives to do the right thing — and the reason is that we don't want to admit how much incentives matter, since direct incentive schemes expose the self-interested motive we'd rather hide; so we don't restructure things to produce the incentives we need, preferring a comfortable pretense of trust (as with doctors or financial intermediaries) over stronger but distrust-implying explicit incentives.
Counter-Signaling Among Close Friends
Counter-signaling is doing the opposite of ordinary friendliness signals to demonstrate a relationship is closer than mere acquaintance — once acquaintanceship is established, insulting, tripping, or skipping meetings with a close friend signals that the bond is secure enough to withstand it; similarly top students show off by acing exams without studying ('too cool for school').
Self-Deception May Be Better For You Personally
Because evolution constructed us to be ignorant of our motives as a trade-off favoring social benefits, most people in environments resembling those evolution anticipated are probably better off staying ignorant; the cynical conscious analysis mainly benefits unusual cases — salespeople, managers, nerds who can't read the social world intuitively, and policy analysts who are professionally responsible for knowing what's really going on.
Conversation Is Showing Off Your Toolkit
Conversation is not primarily about exchanging information but about showing off your 'backpack' of tools, knowledge, and connections that you can bring to bear on any topic — demonstrating to potential allies that whatever future problems arise, you'll have something useful. Evidence against the information theory: we don't track informational debts, we'd rather talk than listen, we don't prioritize the most valuable topics, and conversations drift slowly rather than jumping to important things.
School Is Signaling, Not Learning
The real dominant function of education is not to learn useful material but to credential yourself — to signal to employers that you are smart, conscientious, and conformist enough to complete mildly boring assignments under ambiguous instructions over years. This is shown by puzzles the learning story can't explain: students don't retain or use much of what they learn, college-going bartenders earn more than high-school bartenders, the final year of high school or college is worth as much as the prior three combined despite no extra learning, and you can attend the best classes for free if you don't want the credential.
Social Subtext Must Stay Implicit To Function
Much of social life runs on subtext that everyone tacitly understands, but making it explicit destroys the basis of trust or goodwill — for example, openly telling someone you only invited them to dinner to reciprocate their prior invitation, though true, is antithetical to friendship; like actors who refuse to play a scene with only one literal level, we expect and require multiple layers of motive.
Mild Conspiracy Belief Signals Vigilance
Because people are really more concerned with the world immediately around them — which genuinely contains many conspiracies (cheating partners, infidelity, selling junk) — believing and talking about conspiracy theories about the larger world is a direct signal to those around you that you're watching and won't be fooled, which is socially functional; it only becomes pathological when taken too far, and conspiracy believers cluster (believing one tends to mean believing many), revealing the underlying signal isn't really about the specific claim.
Target Automation Insurance Globally And Specifically
Universal basic income is a poor solution to automation risk for two reasons: it typically uses a local tax base, which fails if the robot economy is geographically concentrated, and it is poorly targeted, redistributing in all cases rather than only when robots take the jobs; the ideal is global insurance contracts that pay off specifically when robots take all the jobs and not otherwise, which would be cheap precisely because that outcome is far off.
Corporations Do The Dirty Work We Avoid
Corporations function for us much as money-lending Jews did in medieval Christendom: they do the morally dirty work — firing people, disrupting things, ruthlessly following the profit motive — that we personally find too emotionally painful to do, allowing us to enjoy the benefits of a world where underperformers get fired and things work better while avoiding the blame ourselves; so although there is a real conflict of motives here, you probably don't actually want a world where corporations stop doing these things.
Cross-Field Learning Has Scale Economies
Learning many fields has increasing returns: the more fields and mental models you acquire, the faster you can learn new fields, so an intellectual project of mastering multiple disciplines and combining their insights is something you continue to do better as you age, making it a self-reinforcing 'wave' to ride.
Medicine Is About Caring Not Health
Medicine is mostly about showing that we care rather than producing health, evidenced by puzzles in the data: geographic areas that spend more on medicine or have more doctor visits are not healthier, and randomized experiments varying the price of medicine (so some consume more, some less) find no difference in health between the groups — meaning the bundle of medicine contains both helpful and harmful parts roughly canceling out, while strongly health-correlated factors like exercise and air quality attract little interest.
Prediction Markets Work But Nobody Wants Them
Prediction (betting) markets reliably produce more accurate estimates on important topics and are cheap, demonstrable in math, lab and field experiments — yet people are consistently uninterested in them, which Hanson now explains by his own thesis: he mistakenly took people at their word about wanting accurate information when in fact, emotionally, that is not what they want.
Institutions Let Us Pretend While Getting What We Want
Our usual institutions let us pretend to pursue the things we say we want while actually delivering, under the surface, the things we really want. Policy analysts fail because they propose reforms that deliver more of what we pretend to want, which we're uninterested in; a reform succeeds only if it lets us keep up the pretense of pursuing the noble goal while actually getting more of what we truly want — but if an analyst names this out loud, we reject it because we can't admit it.
Change Your Context Not Your Willpower
Because you don't have much willpower, the most effective way to change your behavior is not to make lists and remind yourself but to change your context — get the people around you to pressure you toward the desired behavior, since the threat of social embarrassment from publicizing a noble standard you fail to meet is a far stronger lever than self-reminders. This is a 'dangerous strategy' because overreaching to standards you can't meet just makes you seem arrogant.
Hidden Motives Pervade Major Institutions
Beyond personal hypocrisy, the deviation between our stated reasons and actual motives pervades major social institutions like school, medicine, voting, and art — which means we should reconsider what these institutions are actually for, whether we should subsidize them, and how we should structure them.
Cheaters Want Norms Enforced Except For Themselves
We want to live in communities where norms are enforced while also wanting ourselves to be exceptions — most criminals actually believe crime is bad, they just think their particular acts don't quite count — and one way to manage this contradiction is to be dishonest with ourselves about what we are doing.
Conscious Mind Is a Press Secretary
The conscious part of your mind is not the king or president in charge of your behavior but a press secretary: it doesn't actually know why you do things, but it is skilled at constructing good-sounding excuses after the fact, and it doesn't realize that it doesn't know.
Norms Are Rules Third Parties Enforce
Unlike other social animals, humans uniquely have norms: rules about what one is supposed to do where, if a third party witnesses a violation, they are themselves expected to do something about it — report it, spread word, or pressure the violator to stop. Many such norms (help each other, don't brag, don't be violent, decide by consensus, avoid coalitions) are common across human cultures and are often expressed in terms of motives.
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