#14: Robin Hanson - Cultural Drift, Ems, Elephants, Institutions, and The Future

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University, the author of The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain, the writer of the blog Overcoming Bias, and one of the most interesting polymaths alive today.

0:00 - Intro

1:24 - Mathematical models and grabby aliens

9:11 - Will we run out of value in the future?12:23 - Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns

14:29 - Posadism

17:53 - Moral progress and Whig history

20:29 - Will there be a trad resurgence?

23:00 - Will Israel’s ultra-Orthodox problem globalize?

25:39 - Why will fertility rate keep dropping?

30:14 - Is declining fertility solvable technologically?

32:20 - What is wokeness? Has it peaked?

35:02 - Will virtualization make society more multicultural?

39:30 - How do institutions coordinate so well?

42:50 - Will ems care about death?

46:16 - Personal identity and death

49:30 - How much of Age of Em is applicable to LLMs?

51:09 - Why we shouldn’t worry about AI risk

55:40 - What if people don’t see AIs as their descendants?

1:00:41 - Other future tech deep dives

1:02:43 - Our very long-run descendants

1:06:08 - Time and risk preferences

1:08:34 - Wouldn’t ems be selected for docility?

1:11:24 - How Robin got involved in rationalism

1:13:22 - Girls getting the “ick”

1:16:56 - Have humans evolved since forager times?

1:18:28 - Cultural evolution

1:20:30 - Culture and prestige

1:22:49 - Why medicine in the US is bad

1:25:54 - Is academia the best truth-seeking institution in society?

1:28:52 - Peer review

1:31:13 - Which institutions are actually good?

1:32:33 - Why universities are all the same

1:37:40 - Bitcoin and speculation

1:46:44 - Demarchy

1:50:03 - Futarchy

1:53:56 - Applying prediction markets to dating apps

1:57:38 - The broadest thinkers and books in the world

2:00:59 - How Robin balances his many interests

2:01:58 - Teaching

2:03:12 - Outro

Robin’s Homepage: https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/home.html

Overcoming Bias: https://www.overcomingbias.com/

Robin’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhansonGrabby Aliens: https://grabbyaliens.com/

Age of Em: https://archive.is/LMrr9The Elephant in the Brain: https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/

Beware Cultural Drift: https://quillette.com/2024/04/11/beware-cultural-drift/

More Episodes

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdJRQ6924HY&list=PLVN8-zhbMh9YnOGVRT9m0xzqTNGD_sujj

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1IJRtB8FP4Cnq8lWuuCdvW?si=b4001cf2e8a5453f

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/theo-jaffee-podcast/id1699912677

My Twitter: https://x.com/theojaffee

My Substack: https://www.theojaffee.com