I think you'd have much the same problem as a US senator. (Or, what kind of position do you think someone would need to be in to pitch your ideas with better success?) These are big ideas, unfamiliar, disruptive. I'm not sure anybody has enough status to push them in the short term. Prediction markets are finally going and you've earned a lot of standing for that (for those who paid attention). But yes it took decades and shouldn't have. And things like futarchy are much bigger. Big ideas just take a lot of time - a generation has to grow up familiar with them.
It's all relative. Hanson is higher status than me, but lower status than, say, Donald Trump, who can much more easily get people to listen to his ideas even if they are of lower quality.
It sounds like there needs to be a market where people with big ideas hire high status people to push those ideas as though they were there own yo affect policy.
Which sounds pretty much exactly what the Davos crowd and George Soros are accused of doing. It might be that you are not the first one to realize this :)
"So, similarly, should folks with poor social skills not publish new ideas, or make their ideas easier to rebrand, or post in places seen more by people with better social skills? Or trade ideas in a private exchange?"
A similar thing happens in Congress. Someone writes the text of a bill, but then some congress member has to sign it, effectively taking credit for the bill.
Have you considered just becoming an elite yourself? i.e. get into politics, or start a tech startup, or a hedge fund, or similar.
Also which of your ideas require people to invest their capital and attention with no immediate return, and which ones provide return immediately if successful?
For instance, you popularised prediction markets. If you hadn't just talked about it but had started Polymarket yourself, you could literally have been a billionaire by now. Which would have then let you invest in a lot of other ideas.
How does this square with your claim that "youth movements" are what's primarily driving cultural change? Campus activists certainly aren't the highest status folks around, and yet actual elites seem to basically go along with their agenda (insofar as this doesn't threaten hard power structures). I'd say that the reason that their ideas get adopted while yours don't is that they are perceived as the avant-garde of the currently dominant elite ideology ("progressivism"), while you position yourself as a contrarian.
It's an interesting thesis, but here's an alternative interpretation of the situation.
Perhaps people in positions of hyper-prestige typically got there by jumping through hoops and conforming. They aren't dispositionally suited to produce the big ideas we need. And even if they were, the demands of their position mean they have to color within the lines or be subject to ridicule.
So even if a big shot had some brilliant breakthrough idea, they wouldn't announce it--they don't want to torch their career. Instead, new ideas need to go through a period of development. Only after extensive discussion and vetting will big shots bet their reputation on the new idea.
They rebrand the idea not in order to take credit, but in order to avoid unwanted association with its [potentially] unwashed developers. Big shots *became* big shots by carefully avoiding PR threats, and prudently stewarding their reputational capital. The developers will only be associated with the idea if the big shots estimate that it's net-positive reputationally to associate themselves with the developers.
The practical implications are different, no? Your thesis implies that a person with new ideas should explain them to elites in a way that makes elites believe they had the idea themselves. Or just wait until elites have the same idea.
"This 'stigma pollution' seems to be a problem for relatively low status folks like me who choose to focus on finding and publicly arguing for new ideas and innovations."
Fascinating. I'm also fairly low-status, also preoccupied with truth and accuracy, and have also noticed that this combination is often disadvantageous, in a way that's somehow difficult to even discuss. I find it odd that MORE people don't find it odd that there's essentially an ideological panopticon laid over academia and corporate work culture which enjoins us from stating certain ideas (not violent, not untrue, not useless - but prohibited nonetheless).
I'm writing a tongue-in-cheek piece ("The Widening Gyre") in which I make a humorous case that readers have a moral duty to share my work. This concept will be useful for that.
Well then we just need to increase your status, Robin! [Seriously, you're a professor at a first-rate university; you're not low status.]
But the ideas I pitch are much bigger than deemed appropriate for my position.
I think you'd have much the same problem as a US senator. (Or, what kind of position do you think someone would need to be in to pitch your ideas with better success?) These are big ideas, unfamiliar, disruptive. I'm not sure anybody has enough status to push them in the short term. Prediction markets are finally going and you've earned a lot of standing for that (for those who paid attention). But yes it took decades and shouldn't have. And things like futarchy are much bigger. Big ideas just take a lot of time - a generation has to grow up familiar with them.
I fully agree that "Robin Hanson" is high status.
It's all relative. Hanson is higher status than me, but lower status than, say, Donald Trump, who can much more easily get people to listen to his ideas even if they are of lower quality.
It sounds like there needs to be a market where people with big ideas hire high status people to push those ideas as though they were there own yo affect policy.
Which sounds pretty much exactly what the Davos crowd and George Soros are accused of doing. It might be that you are not the first one to realize this :)
"So, similarly, should folks with poor social skills not publish new ideas, or make their ideas easier to rebrand, or post in places seen more by people with better social skills? Or trade ideas in a private exchange?"
A similar thing happens in Congress. Someone writes the text of a bill, but then some congress member has to sign it, effectively taking credit for the bill.
Have you considered just becoming an elite yourself? i.e. get into politics, or start a tech startup, or a hedge fund, or similar.
Also which of your ideas require people to invest their capital and attention with no immediate return, and which ones provide return immediately if successful?
For instance, you popularised prediction markets. If you hadn't just talked about it but had started Polymarket yourself, you could literally have been a billionaire by now. Which would have then let you invest in a lot of other ideas.
How does this square with your claim that "youth movements" are what's primarily driving cultural change? Campus activists certainly aren't the highest status folks around, and yet actual elites seem to basically go along with their agenda (insofar as this doesn't threaten hard power structures). I'd say that the reason that their ideas get adopted while yours don't is that they are perceived as the avant-garde of the currently dominant elite ideology ("progressivism"), while you position yourself as a contrarian.
It is the elites of youths who drive youth movements.
It's an interesting thesis, but here's an alternative interpretation of the situation.
Perhaps people in positions of hyper-prestige typically got there by jumping through hoops and conforming. They aren't dispositionally suited to produce the big ideas we need. And even if they were, the demands of their position mean they have to color within the lines or be subject to ridicule.
So even if a big shot had some brilliant breakthrough idea, they wouldn't announce it--they don't want to torch their career. Instead, new ideas need to go through a period of development. Only after extensive discussion and vetting will big shots bet their reputation on the new idea.
They rebrand the idea not in order to take credit, but in order to avoid unwanted association with its [potentially] unwashed developers. Big shots *became* big shots by carefully avoiding PR threats, and prudently stewarding their reputational capital. The developers will only be associated with the idea if the big shots estimate that it's net-positive reputationally to associate themselves with the developers.
Sounds pretty close to what I said.
The practical implications are different, no? Your thesis implies that a person with new ideas should explain them to elites in a way that makes elites believe they had the idea themselves. Or just wait until elites have the same idea.
"This 'stigma pollution' seems to be a problem for relatively low status folks like me who choose to focus on finding and publicly arguing for new ideas and innovations."
Fascinating. I'm also fairly low-status, also preoccupied with truth and accuracy, and have also noticed that this combination is often disadvantageous, in a way that's somehow difficult to even discuss. I find it odd that MORE people don't find it odd that there's essentially an ideological panopticon laid over academia and corporate work culture which enjoins us from stating certain ideas (not violent, not untrue, not useless - but prohibited nonetheless).
I'm writing a tongue-in-cheek piece ("The Widening Gyre") in which I make a humorous case that readers have a moral duty to share my work. This concept will be useful for that.