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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

@TGGP

Actually, Robin was saying economic inequality is a good thing and because he likened it to biological evolution he must have meant that more inequality is better (because more diversity is pretty much always better for evolution), he literally says:

"This is a problem because it is very hard to imagine a Cambrian explosion level of diversity among our descendants without a lot more inequality"

And that makes him a hypocrite because he's not giving up anything himself to achieve more inequality, apparently, inequality is only a good thing when it's other people that lose their wealth. I still believe the best way to find out if someone really believes in something is to ask them to lead by example. Would Robin Hanson support an anti-Buffett Rule (raising taxes on the middle class and lowering them on the rich) that would cost Robin Hanson money?

He does also say that we need a lot of economic inequality to get a better future (better for some), but he doesn't back that up. All he does is make a convenient, far-fetched analogy, convenient because he could also have chosen "diversity in all layers of scoiety" (which would mean equal opportunities and therefore a large measure of equality) instead of "diversity in income", but the latter suits his political preferences better, so he went with that. He didn't back his position up while I can provide a counter on the spot (strong economic inequality excludes a lot of potential talent from being put to good use because the poor majority would not be able to afford higher education).

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

If by 'coordination' you mean a straw man totalitarian communist government, as Hanson appears to refer to in the second last paragraph, then yes, we are probably unable to make that work properly.But assuming that this is the only possible alternative to a high financial inequality society is a false dichotomy.

Anyway, I don't buy the claim that there is any 'Cambrian explosion' around the corner: people here love to fantasise about brain emulation, but the reality is that brain scan technology is sci-fi, and we don't have the computational power to emulate even a rat brain. Extrapolating Moore's laws way past the physical limits of silicon integrated circuits manufactured by photolithography, seems unjustified.

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