Who wouldn’t want to see Tyler Cowen publicly debate Robin Hanson? Well, aside from the masses? I think they’d both…

Hasn’t this claim been made before? Didn’t Linus Pauling sign a petition to LBJ predicting that computers would create massive unemployment? If so, doesn’t the current “internet economy” make the future “robot economy” much less scary?

(I’m assuming this is a fair statement of Robin’s view.)

Individuals are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers. Thus, even though propensities to things like art may have evolved because they signaled fitness, claiming that signaling fitness is the ‘real motivation’ for art isn’t exactly accurate. The individual does love art for art’s sake; the individual does not have ’signal to increase reproductive fitness’ represented anywhere in their brain. Love of art can be sincere without any self-deception being involved, as the signaling motivation can’t be discovered by any amount of introspection, only by doing science.

Do you place less value on art now that you’re aware of the evolutionary reason for appreciating it?

If only there were betting markets, you could publicize your portfolio of predictions and ask Tyler which, if any, he has taken the other side on. That would refute, or at least reflect, the incredulous stare.

“My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: “When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is `Eh, maybe.’ Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is `No way! Impossible!’ Then I think about it for years.”"

In other words, I am telling the reader that even if some of this sounds crazy, there is a lot to it.

• You are right that freezing might not be feasible in specific cases; I misunderstood you there.
• Yes I would personally prefer to maximize total world wealth, broadly understood, but the phrase “national income” usually connotes a narrower accounting measure, and my proposal is to have a legislature manage the details of defining a national, not world, welfare.
• On signaling, I was complaining about the phrase “to show we are fit mates,” not the phrase “to furthering our genetic fitness.”
• I agree that I am overall relatively skeptical about medicine, and that I typically refer to a wide margin in medicine, corresponding to the roughly 30% margin examined in the RAND health insurance experiment. And I have expressed doubts about the other 70%. But the phrase “the money we spend … is a waste” suggests a stronger claim about a 100% margin. My reference to clean air and exercise was to distinguish “health care” from “medicine.”