RobinHanson

• RobinHanson 25 Oct 2025 9:48 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Olli Savolainen’s comment on: Try­ing to un­der­stand Han­son’s Cul­tural Drift argument

  Our best models and data do say that innovation rates would fall with population. https://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​p/​​how-much-more-innovation-before-pause

• RobinHanson 25 Oct 2025 9:46 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: Try­ing to un­der­stand Han­son’s Cul­tural Drift argument

  I just now noticed this. Why not contact me if you have questions, or at least point me to your post? I don’t automatically hear anytime someone mentions my name, after all.

  Yes, the idea is that we value stuff about our culture that will be lost if it is replaced by other very different cultures. People in the Roman Empires who liked its cultures should have wanted to prevent its fall and replacement by the Christian culture.

  Why talk about an outside view then? To get you to see that your culture is threatened from the outside.

• RobinHanson 18 Jun 2025 19:04 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: dynomight’s comment on: Futarchy’s fun­da­men­tal flaw

  You say that markets give evidential conditionals while decisions want causal conditionals. For this comment, I’m not taking a position on which conditional we want for decisions. I’m just saying that both trades and the decision advised should use the same conditional, but I’m not saying which one that is.

• RobinHanson 18 Jun 2025 9:58 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: dynomight’s comment on: Futarchy’s fun­da­men­tal flaw

  Market estimates will converge to the most profitable P(X if A), the one that wins bets vs other versions. And that is the version you want to use when you make decisions.

• RobinHanson 17 Jun 2025 14:08 UTC

  25 points

  2

  on: Futarchy’s fun­da­men­tal flaw

  I respond here: https://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​p/​​decision-conditional-prices-reflect

• RobinHanson 16 Jun 2025 15:09 UTC

  5 points

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  on: Futarchy us­ing a sealed-bid auc­tion to avoid liquidity problems

  “if a investor doesn’t review a proposal, we assume that they are submitting an unconditional sell bid.” Of ALL of their shares, at any price? Seems a way to force a sale at a low price.

  Also call markets don’t aggregate info as well as continuous double auctions, and you aren’t offering any incentives to find and add info.

• RobinHanson 2 Apr 2025 18:12 UTC

  6 points

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  on: How pre­dic­tion mar­kets can cre­ate harm­ful out­comes: a case study

  Metaculus wouldn’t work if it didn’t offer incentives for participants. The fact that they aren’t monetary doesn’t mean they won’t induce the same sort of problems you worry about above.

  Surely we should compare, for particular topics, the magnitude of actual sabotage to the magnitude of the info value gained. And there are many ways to design markets to reduce the rate of sabotage.

• RobinHanson 5 Mar 2023 0:18 UTC

  7 points

  7

  in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Con­tra Han­son on AI Risk

  Seems to me I spent a big % of my post arguing against the rapid growth claim.

• RobinHanson 5 Mar 2023 0:17 UTC

  2 points

  5

  in reply to: RobertM’s comment on: Con­tra Han­son on AI Risk

  Come on, most every business tracks revenue in great detail. If customers were getting unhappy with the firm’s services and rapidly switching en mass, the firm would quickly become very aware, and looking into the problem in great detail.

• RobinHanson 5 Mar 2023 0:15 UTC

  10 points

  6

  in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Con­tra Han­son on AI Risk

  You complain that my estimating rates from historical trends is arbitrary, but you offer no other basis for estimating such rates. You only appeal to uncertainty. But there are several other assumptions required for this doomsday scenario. If all you have is logical possibility to argue for piling on several a priori unlikely assumptions, it gets hard to take that seriously.

• RobinHanson 4 Mar 2023 15:56 UTC

  22 points

  16

  on: Con­tra Han­son on AI Risk

  You keep invoking the scenario of a single dominant AI that is extremely intelligent. But that only happens AFTER a single AI fooms to be much better than all other AIs. You can’t invoke its super intelligence to explain why its owners fail to notice and control its early growth.

• RobinHanson 26 Jul 2022 15:40 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: Repli­cat­ing and ex­tend­ing the grabby aliens model

  I comment on this paper here: https://​​www.overcomingbias.com/​​2022/​​07/​​cooks-critique-of-our-earliness-argument.html

• RobinHanson 21 Jul 2022 18:45 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Tristan Cook’s comment on: Repli­cat­ing and ex­tend­ing the grabby aliens model

  That’s an exponential with mean 0.7, or mean ¹⁄₀.7?

• RobinHanson 21 Jul 2022 14:32 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Repli­cat­ing and ex­tend­ing the grabby aliens model

  “My prior on $L_{max}$ is distributed $L_{max}\sim 5Gy+{10}^{Exp\left(0.7\right)}$”

  I don’t understand this notation. It reads to me like “103+ 5 Gy”; how is that a distribution?

• RobinHanson 30 Jun 2022 18:21 UTC

  13 points

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  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Linkpost: Robin Han­son—Why Not Wait On AI Risk?

  It seems the key feature of this remaining story is the “coalition of AIs” part. I can believe that AIs would get powerful, what I’m skeptical about is the claim that they naturally form a coalition of them against us. Which is also what I object to in your prior comments. Horses are terrible at coordination compared to humans, and humans weren’t built by horses and integrated into a horse society, with each human originally in the service of a particular horse.

• RobinHanson 27 Jun 2022 21:18 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: aog’s comment on: Linkpost: Robin Han­son—Why Not Wait On AI Risk?

  Its not enough that AI might appear in a few decades, you also need something useful you can do about it now, compared to investing your money to have more to spend later when concrete problems appear.

• RobinHanson 27 Jun 2022 21:04 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Linkpost: Robin Han­son—Why Not Wait On AI Risk?

  I just read through your “what 2026 looks like” post, but didn’t see how it is a problematic scenario. Why should we want to work ahead of time to prepare for that scenario?

• RobinHanson 9 May 2022 3:29 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: How con­fi­dent are we that there are no Ex­tremely Ob­vi­ous Aliens?

  In our simulations, we find it overwhelmingly likely that any such spherical volume of an alien civ would be much larger than the full moon in the sky. So no need to study distant galaxies in fine detail; look for huge spheres in the sky.

• RobinHanson 28 Dec 2021 14:02 UTC

  2 points

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  on: [Book Re­view] “Suffer­ing-fo­cused Ethics” by Mag­nus Vinding

  “or more likely we are an early civilization in the universe (according to Robin Hanson’s “Grabby Aliens” model) so, 2) quite possibly there are no grabby aliens populating the universe with S-Risks yet”

  But our model implies that there are in fact many aliens out there right now. Just not in our backward light cone.

• RobinHanson 10 Oct 2021 16:05 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: teageegeepea’s comment on: Talk by Robin Han­son on Elites

  Aw, I still don’t know which face goes with the TGGP name.