Tag Archives: Personal

You & The Distant Future

By Robin Hanson · February 9, 2012 9:50 am · Comments (1)

I spoke again yesterday to mostly retired folks at GMU’s lifelong learning institute, on “You & the Distant Future” (audio; slides). I talked on near-far theory, long-term bequests, and cryonics.

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Imagine Being Wrong

By Robin Hanson · January 17, 2012 10:00 am · Comments (30)

I felt myself wince recently when I wrote “I imagine that if I were a racist.” I realized that I’m not supposed be able to imagine being a racist. Even though a most folks in history have believed, often reasonably given their evidence, that races differ substantially on important qualities. And even though historians, sociologists, etc. regularly study and understand racists.

Apparently one is supposed to believe that racists are so obviously and extremely crazy that it is impossible for a reasonable person to see things from their point of view. Pretending to believe this signals to your associates confidence in your shared anti-racist position, and so is a signal of group loyalty.

But it seems a bad habit to get into, if you want to believe the truth. No doubt many positions are hard to understand, at least without some practice and preparation. Being rational in disagreements is hard exactly because it is so much easier to see one’s own reasoning than to imagine the reasoning of others. And we have only a limited ability to overcome this barrier. But to go out of your way to make it hard to see things from another’s view, that suggests one is more interested in showing loyalty than in discerning truth.

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Unspeakable Arrogance

By Robin Hanson · January 11, 2012 10:30 am · Comments (60)

Pretty much everyone thinks they are better than some of the people they meet. Not better on all possible features of course, but better on the features that matter most to them. But it seems to be arrogant to say “I often think that I am better than other folks I meet”, and especially so to say it about particular people. As in, “I am better than George.”

But for the purposes of this post, I’ll have to own up to this. I am in fact often disappointed by the people I meet. For me it is mostly about their intellectual curiosity and abilities in conversation. They either show little interest in fundamentally interesting things, or they show interest but seem incapable of effectively engaging such topics. C’est la vie.

Interestingly, my feelings often go beyond mere disappointment into full irritation – it bothers me to share a room, a department, a firm, a stage, etc. with them. Sometimes I am even angry. Yet such irritation makes a lot less sense that it would seem.

Consider how I would treat a dog, or a young child with similar intellectual capabilities. Abilities that are disappointing in someone with whom I’d share a stage could be quite impressive in a dog or a young child. I imagine I’d be quite happy to associate with such a dog or child, and hardly irritated at all by their lack of capacity. I could easily find activities that they and I would find mutually enjoyable. And I imagine that if I were a racist, classist, or sexist, surrounded by those who shared my racism, classism, or sexism, I could find ways to associate comfortably with my race, class, or gender inferiors, as long as it were clear to all that they were my inferiors.

I’m led to conclude that it I’m not so much irritated by the low abilities of associates, as by rivalry and how my associating with them will reflect on me. If they don’t share my low opinion of them, I’ll have to either hide my opinion, or to create a conflict by expressing it. And even if they do share my opinion of our relative abilities, others might see me as arrogant to visibly acknowledge it. Since there are lots of ways to lose and few ways to win this game, I’d rather not play.

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Heads In The Sand

By Robin Hanson · December 31, 2011 9:05 pm · Comments (12)

The end of a Boston Globe article on The future of prediction:

But the real question, when it comes to predicting the future of forecasting, may not be whether we can or can’t forecast accurately — it’s whether we want to. Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a pioneer of prediction market design, thinks that what’s holding back our ability to predict is not technology or a lack of ingenuity. He believes companies and governments already have much of what they need to be a lot better at predicting the future, and that the reason they’re not taking more advantage of it is that in many cases, having accurate predictions in hand makes managers, CEOs, and government officials accountable in a way that lots of them don’t want to be.

That’s because knowing the future can be a scary thing: It means genuinely answering for the costs of our decisions, confronting the likelihood of failure, seeing that arrows point down as often as they point up. When we’re offered a look into the crystal ball, it may in fact be human nature to turn away.

“We’re two-faced,” Hanson said. “We like to talk as though we wanted better forecasts, but often we have other agendas. When the opportunity to know the future presents itself — as, increasingly, it will — we may end up discovering that we’d rather stay in the dark.”

When projects fails, project managers like to say “No one could have foreseen that. We did the best we could.” This strategy doesn’t work so well when prediction markets or other credible methods create clear public track records showing consensus estimates of a high chance of failure, and perhaps also what could have been done to reduce that chance.

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Seeking What-Work-Cuts Stories

By Robin Hanson · December 20, 2011 3:00 pm · Comments (41)

To better imagine the lives of future ems, I want to learn more about the lives of people who work near eighty or more hours per week today. Since I haven’t found much academic work, I thought I might ask readers here directly.

If you, or someone you know well, has spent a year or more doing “work” (including commuting, school, and childcare) in the ballpark of eighty or more hours per week, I’d like to hear (in the comments below) about how your/their non-work priorities change as a result. Compared to similar folks who work only forty hours a week, high-work folks must spend less time sleeping, eating, socializing, watching TV, etc. But which of these activities take the biggest hit?

One clue might be the ratio of time spent on activities on weekdays vs. weekends. On weekdays we spend about as much time as on weekends on grooming, phone/email, eating, and sleeping. But we cut way back on art, religion, social events, and home maintenance. Here are the stats: a 2010 breakdown of weekday and weekend hours per activity, for US civilians age 15+, from the American Time Use Survey:

Continue reading "Seeking What-Work-Cuts Stories" »

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Life Is Good

By Robin Hanson · December 12, 2011 11:20 am · Comments (34)

At Sunday’s meetup, some folks expressed surprise that I seemed nicer, softer, and less cynical in person, relative to my writings. I do often take “cynical” positions, in the sense of assigning low motives to behavior, and cynics do often have sour attitudes.

So let me take this opportunity to affirm something that usually seems too obvious to be worth mentioning: life is good! Lives based on motives that are not considered especially admirable can be satisfying and enjoyable. For example, I like to compete (such as in board games and conversation), to be admired, to lust, to find fault and criticize, and to make and spend money. I love talking with smart people interested in interesting topics, even if I don’t agree with them. And I love having the time and freedom to think and write about topics that interest me. And, do I really need to say it, I love eating, sleeping, getting clean, riding my bike, watching clouds float past the trees, etc. And I don’t think I’m that unusual. Even if most of us follow low motives most of the time, LIFE IS GOOD!

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Second Chances

By Robin Hanson · November 19, 2011 10:00 am · Comments (21)

In 1993, at the age of 34, I began a Ph.D. at Caltech, which I finished four years later. I probably didn’t make much more money afterward, but I’m a lot more satisfied with my life. Apparently this is a common outcome of late life schooling:

This paper addresses the economic returns on tertiary degrees obtained in ages above 30 for individuals with upper-secondary schooling [in] Sweden [where] labor market legislation supports employees who take a leave to study. … Late degrees were found to increase the employment rate by 18 percentage points and earnings while employed by 12 percent. … The effects were absent in the higher parts of the earnings distribution, and females gained more than men. (more)

Human lives are long. If you are willing to work, you can radically change direction, even at the age of 34.

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Daniel Sarewitz, Me on BHTV

By Robin Hanson · October 29, 2011 9:15 am · Comments (7)

Daniel Sarewitz and I have a new Blogging Heads TV episode, largely on human enhancement:

I tried a different visual setting, which didn’t work at all (sorry). We agreed with each other more than I expected. If we do this again, which I’d love, I expect we’ll find more disagreements.

Listening to it again, I notice a lot of points that slipped by me at the time. For example, I should have challenged the claim that regulation isn’t what blocks automation from displacing doctors. But that’s the nature of a fast moving wide ranging conversation.

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Me On Ideas In Action

By Robin Hanson · October 27, 2011 2:00 pm · Comments (15)

In this half-hour episode, Jim Glassman interviews Martin Ford and I on Will Robots Take Our Jobs?. (I posted on Tyler and Ford here.) You might think we’d go into more argument detail in a half hour show, but alas we seem to just repeat the same top level points. This was in part due to an interview, rather than a debate, format. Glassman also seemed more interested in getting Ford to make dramatic claims than in hearing rebuttals – Ford got to say 40% more words than I.

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Aged Wisdom

By Robin Hanson · September 28, 2011 6:40 pm · Comments (38)

At lunch recently, Bryan asked: what wisdom do we old folks have to pass on to young folk, if only they would listen? A few possibilities:

1) You might look inside yourself and think you know yourself, but over many decades you can change in ways you won’t see ahead of time. Don’t assume you know who you will become. This applies all the more to folks around you. You may know who they are now, but not who they will become.

2) You are more flexible than you realize. You may think now life that would not be worth living without your preferred city, career, partner, or hobby. But you really would adapt to most big changes, and have an ok life without most of what you now hold precious. Old folks with weak bodies and fading minds still love life.

3) Human lives are long. You might be unpopular when young, but with decades of work you could become popular when old. If you have something you are just dying to do, a lifetime can fit many failures before an eventual success. While it can be reasonable to take a few years of failure as a sign you might prefer something else, if this is really what you most want, you’ll have many more decades to keep trying.

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