YouSaid · the spoken record

Robin Hanson

lines on the record: 314
first: 2022-06-09
most recent: 2022-06-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Again, I told you compared to sort of a dead cosmology, at least it's energizing and having a living story with real actors and characters and agendas, right?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The timing isn't clear. We might become glabby, and then this happens. These are grabbiness, and this are both the results of competition, but it's less clear which happens first.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not the actual process that's changed the world over history up to this point. It has not been the result of us deciding what we want and making it happen. In our individual lives, we can do that. We might decide what career we want or where we want to live, who we want to live with. In our individual lives, we often do slowly make our lives better according to our plan and our things. But that's not the whole world. Whole world so far has mostly been a competitive world where things happen if anybody anywhere chooses to adopt them and they have an advantage. And then it spreads and people are forced to adopt it by competitive pressures. So that's the kind of analysis I can use to predict the future. And I do use that to predict the future. It doesn't tell us it'll be a future we like. It just tells us what it'll be.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe, but so, I mean, this is the fundamental issue in analyzing the future. What will set the future? One theory about what will set the future is, what do we want the future to be? So under that theory, we should sit and talk about what we want to future be, have some conferences, have some conventions, discussion things, vote on it maybe, and then hand out off to the implementation people to make the future the way we've decided it should be.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's the nature of being a human of the sort that we are, because even though we can think abstractly and reason abstractly, this package of motivations is just opaque and a mess. And that's what it means to be a human today and the motivation. We can't very well tell the meaning of our life. It is this mess. Our descendants will be different. They will actually know exactly what they want, and it will be to have more descendants. That will be the meaning for them.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here. This is the thing I told you before about how we can predict that future creatures will be different from us. We, our preferences are this amalgam of various sorts of random sort of patched together preferences about thirst and sex and sleep and attention and all these sorts of things. So we don't understand that very well. It's not very transparent and it's a mess, right? That is the source of our motivation. That is how we were made and how we are induced to do things. But we can't summarize it very well and we don't even understand it very well. That's who we are. And often we find ourselves in a situation where we don't feel very motivated. We don't know why. In other situations we find ourselves very motivated and we don't know why either.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or somebody is clueless in the process of supporting this leisure, right? It might not be the person leisuring. They're a supporting character or something, but still that's got to be a pretty small fraction of leisure.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isn't that the forger? Right, but now we're looking at the fraction of leisure, which takes the form of something where the person doing the leisure doesn't realize it. Now, there can be some fraction of that, but that's much smaller, right?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a competitive world, in a world where people have to work and have to get things done, then they have a limited budget for leisure. And so leisure things are less common than work things, like real things, right?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we just look at the entire history of everything, we just say, sure. But most things are real, most things aren't fantasies, right? Therefore, the chance that my thing is real, right? So the simulation argument works stronger about sort of the past. We say, ah, but there's more future people than there are today. So you being in the past of the future makes you special relative to them, which makes you more likely to be in a simulation, right? If we're just taking the full count and saying in all creatures ever, what percentage or in simulation is probably no more than 10%.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but clearly I'm in a certain era with a certain kind of world around me, right? So either this is a complete fantasy or it's a past of somebody else in the future”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was just the discussion we just had. That is, you should grant the possibility of being a simulation. You shouldn't be 100% confident that you're not. You should certainly grant a small probability. The question is, how large is that probability?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One story that it sounds plausible to me is that there are sort of these deep story structures that we love and we want to realize. And then many details the world get in their way. Fantasy takes all those obstacles out of the way and lets you tell the essential hero story or the essential love story, whatever essential story you want to tell the reality and constraints are not in the way. And so, science fiction can be thought of as like fantasy, except you're not willing to admit that it's not, can't be true. So the future gives the excuse of saying, well, it could happen.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The closest genre to science fiction is clearly fantasy, fantasy in science fiction in many bookstores and even Netflix or whatever categories. They just lump together. So clearly, they have a similar function. So the function of fantasy is more transparent than the function of science fiction, so use that as your guide. What's fantasy for? It's just to take away the constraints of the ordinary world and imagine stories with much fewer constraints. That's what fantasy is. You're much less constrained.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question is how big is this research institute and how big is the future in a trillion years, right? And that would be hard to say. But if we just look at the ordinary process by which people simulate recent errors, so if you look at, it's also true for movies and plays and video games, overwhelming their There's very few video games where you play someone in the Roman Empire. Even fewer, replay someone in the ancient Egyptian Empire.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably sexual. In a trillion years, there's some small research institute that tries to randomly select from all possible people in history here.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Week play of past memories. First of all, if we assume that simulation of the past is a small fraction of all the creatures at that moment. Yes. Right. And then it's about how fast. Now, some people have argued plausibly that maybe most interest in the past falls with this fast function, but some unusual category of interest in the past won't fall that fast quickly. And then that eventually would dominate. So that's another hypothesis.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the simple way to do it is, as you know, like Google Ngrams has a way to type in a word and see how interested it declines or rises over time, right? Yeah. You can just type in a year and get the answer for that. If you type in a particular year like 1900 or 1950, you can see with Google Engram how interest in that year increased up until that date and decreased after it. And you can see that interest in a date declines faster than does the population grow with time.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if the first function grows slower than the second one declines. In fact, your chances of being simulated are low. So, the key question is, how fast is interest in the past decline relative to the rate at which the population grows with time?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So to figure out this ratio, what we need to think about is basically two functions. One is how fast in time does the number of creatures grow and then how fast in time does the interest in the past decline. Because at any one time, people will be simulating different periods in the past with different emphasis based on the...”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's certainly possible. So the main way I would think about it is in terms of the demand for simulation versus other kinds of things. So I've given this a lot of thought because I first wrote about this long ago when Bostrom first wrote his papers about simulation argument and I wrote about how to live in a simulation. And so the key issue is the fraction of creatures in the universe that are really experiencing what you appear to be really experiencing relative to the fraction that are experiencing it in a simulation way, i.e. simulate it. then the key parameter is at any one moment in time creatures at that time many of them most of them are presumably really experiencing what they're experiencing but some fraction of them are experiencing some past time where that pastime is being remembered via their simulation”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one scenario would be this never really happened. This only happens as a reconstruction later on That's different than the scenario. This did happen the first time, and now it's happening again as a reconstruction. That second scenario is harder to put together because it requires this coincidence where between the two times we produce the ability to do it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the moment, we don't have the technical ability to create that an emulation. So we'd have to be postulating that in the future, we have that ability and then they choose to evaluate this moment now. To sim”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most brain emulations will, in fact, spend most of their time in virtual reality, but they wouldn't think of it as virtual reality. They would just think of it as their usual reality. I mean, the thing to notice, I think, in our world, most of us spend time, most time indoors. And indoors, we are surrounded by walls covered with paint and floors covered with tile or rugs. Most of our environment is artificial. It's constructed to be convenient for us. It's not the natural world that was there before. A virtual reality is basically just like that. It is the environment that's comfortable and convenient for you. But when it's that environment for you, it's real for you, just like the room you're in right now most likely is very real for you. You're not focused on the fact that the paint is hiding the actual studs behind the wall and the actual wires and pipes and everything else. The fact that we're hiding that from you doesn't make it fake or unreal.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can make copies of myself, archive copies at various ages. And at a later age, I could decide that I'd rather replace myself with a new copy from a younger age.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, just like infinity, I mean, you can't know until forever, which means never, right? So all you can really, you know, the better choices at each moment do you want to keep going? So I would like it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when medical science gives up on me in this world instead of burning me or letting worms eat me, they will freeze me or at least freeze my head. And there is damage that happens in the process of freezing the head. But once it's frozen, it won't change for a very long time. Chemically, it'll just be completely exactly the same. So future technology might be able to revive me. And in fact, I would be mainly counting on the brain emulation scenario, which doesn't require reviving my entire biological body. It means I would be in a computer simulation. And so that's, I think I've got at least a 5% shot at that. And that's immortality But most likely it won't happen, and therefore I'm sad that it won't happen.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am a cryonics customer. That's what this little tag around my deck says. It says that if you find me in a medical situation, you should call these people to enable the Cryonx transfer. So I am taking a long shot chance at living a much longer life”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only really need lawyers for this with an inefficient, awkward law that is not very transparent and able to do things. So, you know, for example, an operating system of a computer is a law for that computer. When the operating system is simple and clean, you don't need to hire a lawyer to make a key choice with the operating system. Just make a choice So ideally, we want a legal system that makes the common choices easy and not require much overhead.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will be many new choices to make them they don't make now so. Night, we discussed it, and I discussed that in the book Age of Mike, say you have a lover and you make a copy of yourself, but the lover doesn't make a copy. Well, now, which one of you or are both still related to the lover?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to college, that'll be an interesting thing for M's to find out all the different ways that can have different relationships to different people who have different degrees of similarity to them in time.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But two is different than one. An identical twin's life is richer for having this other identical twin, somebody who understands them better than anybody else can. From the point of view of an identical twain, I think they have a richer life for being part of this couple, which each of which is very similar. Now, if you said, will the world, you know, if we lose one of the idical twins, will the world miss it as much because you've got the other one and they're pretty similar, maybe from the rest of the world's point of view, they suffer less of a loss when they lose one of the identical twins. But from the point of view of the identical twin themselves, their life is enriched by having a twin.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each copy of a song is less special if there are many copies, but the song itself is more special if there are many copies.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think if you think of a song that lots of people listen to that are copies all over the world, we're going to call that a more special song.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With each version of you will. For M's, this will be less of a problem. For M's, they would be able to save and archived copy of themselves at each different age. And they could turn it on periodically and go back and talk to it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly, yes, absolutely, I'm a different person than I was when I was younger, and I'm not who, I don't even remember exactly what he was. So I don't remember as many things from the past as many people do. So in some stuff, I've just lost a lot of my history by not remembering it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I was once younger. I had one health and I had vitality and I was sensimer. I mean, you know, I've lost that over time.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's a sense in which over time we expand our vocabulary as a community of language, and that allows us to sort of have more feelings and know that we are feeling them. That is, you can have a feeling but not have a word for it. And then you don't know how to categorize it or even what it is and whether it's the same as something else. But once you have a word for it, you can sort of pull it together more easily. And so I think over time we are having a richer palette of feelings. We have more words for them”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you need to remember that situation in some sort of complete package. Can't just take one part off of it. And then if you get the whole package again, if you remember the whole feeling.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And it's sort of a reason why one of the reasons that pushes us to reconsume it and reproduce it is that we can't reimagine it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's clearly something we want or need, but we're not exactly very clear about it, and that isn't kind of important to it. So I've also noticed there are some kinds of things you can't imagine very well. So if you imagine a situation, there's some aspects to the situation that you can clearly, you can imagine it being bright or dim, you can imagine it being windy, or you can imagine being hot or cold. But there's some aspects about your emotional stance in a situation that it's actually just hard to imagine or even remember. It's hard to like, you can often remember an emotion only when you're in a similar sort of emotion situation. And otherwise, you just can't bring the emotion to your mind and you can't even imagine it, right? So there's certain kinds of emotions you can have. And when you're in that emotion, you can know that you have it and you can have a name and it's associated. But later on, I tell you, you know, remember joy. And it doesn't come to mind.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opacity in part. That is. Love is one of those things where we know at some level it's important to us, but it's not very clearly shown to us exactly how or why or in what ways. There are some kinds of things we want where we can just clearly see that we want and why that we want it, right? We know when we're thirsty and we know why we were thirsty and we know what to do about being thirsty and we know when it's over that we're no longer thirsty. Love isn't like that.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not in grade school, probably, but you know, yeah. So, you know, being a young, nerdy guy and. Feeling not in much demand or interest or later on. Lots of different kinds of rejection, but yeah, but I think that's most of us like to pretend we don't that much need other people. We don't care what they think. It's a common sort of stance if somebody rejects you or say, well, I didn't care about them anyway. Think to be honest, people really do care.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would just think there are times in your life when you're just in a dark place and that can have many different causes. Most intellectuals are still just people and most of the things that will affect them are the kinds of things that affect people. They aren't that different necessarily. I mean, that's going to be true for, like, I presume most basketball players are still just people if you ask them what was the worst part of their life. It's going to be this kind of thing that was the worst part of their life for most people.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You just asked me what took me to a dark place. You didn't specify it as sort of an intellectual dark place, I guess. I just meant like”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be that I'm just stupid or that I've just categorized them differently than I should or something. You know, the most rejection that I've faced hasn't been because of my intellectual ideas. The intellectual ideas haven't been the thing to risk the rejection.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably just feeling strongly rejected. And so I'm apparently somewhat emotionally scarred by just being very rejection averse, which must have happened because some rejections were just very scarring.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Even so, though, still most of our influence on the future has probably happened being kids, even though we've accumulated more ways, other ways to do it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, I meet a lot of people interested in the future, interested in thinking about the future. They're thinking about how I can influence the future. But, you know, overwhelmingly in history so far, the main way people have influenced the future is by having children. Overwhelmingly. And that's just not an incidental fact. You are built for that. You're the sequence of thousands of generations, each of which successfully had a descendant. And that affected who you are. You just have to expect, and it's true that who you are is built to be expected to have a child, to want to have a child, to have that be a natural and meaningful interaction for you. And it's just true. It's just one of those things you just should have expected. And it's not a surprise.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Overdetermined. I can give you several different reasons, all of which is sufficient. And so the question is we don't know which ones are the correct reasons.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source