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

“I mean, right from the beginning, say special relativity was a big surprise. You know, most of us have a simple concept of time, and it seems perfectly adequate for everything we've ever seen. And to have it explained to you that you need to sort of have a mixture concept of time and space where you put it into the space-time construct, how it looks different from different perspectives, that was quite a shock. And that was such a shock that makes you think what else do I know that isn't the way it seems. Certainly quantum mechanics is certainly another enormous shock in terms of, from your point, you have this idea that there's a space and that there's Particles at points and maybe fields in between.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an important thing to understand about anything who are the customers when I think of and what's the product, like medicine, education, academia, military, et cetera. That's part of the hidden motives analysis. Often people have a thing they say about what the product is and who the customer is. And maybe you need to dig a little deeper to find out what's really going on.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right? Well, every major area of life, which has specialists who get paid to do that thing, must have some customers from elsewhere who are paying for it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could talk about our podcast. Right. I mean, initially, this was my initial concept of having these betting markets on these key parameters. What I then realized over time was that that's more what people pretend to care about. What they really mostly care about is just who's how good. And that's what most of the system is built on is trying to rate people and rank them. And so I designed this other alternative based on historical evaluation centuries later just about who's how good, because that's what I think most of the customers really care about.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we'll be inviting everybody to ask whether they can find any biases or errors in the current ways in which people are estimating these things from whatever clues they have”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would respond, but the question is if they might respond incorrectly, but if you think they're doing it incorrectly, you have a profit opportunity where you have a correction mechanism. You can go fix it.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The variants around the mass of the electron neutrino would decrease with time as we learned that value of that parameter better and any other parameters that we want to estimate.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto is funny. Yes, true. So the idea would be research labs would be for profit. They would have as their expense, paying researchers to study things, and then their profit would come from using the insights the researchers gains to trade in these financial markets Just like hedge funds today make money by paying researchers to study firms and then making their profits by trading on that insight in the ordinary financial market.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been elaborating two versions of it here. So one is if there's a particular question, say the mass of the electron neutrino, and what you as a patron want to do is get an answer to that question, then what you would do is subsidize embedding market in that question under the assumption that eventually we'll just know the answer and we can pay off the bets that way. And that is a plausible assumption for many kinds of concrete intellectual questions like what's the mass of the electron neutrino.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be able to rate that because you could see the path with which ideas took which things had dead ends, which led to what other followings. You could. Looking back centuries later, have a much better estimate of who actually had what long-term effects on intellectual progress. So my proposal is we actually pay people in several centuries to do this historical analysis, and we have prediction markets today where we buy and sell assets, which will later off pay off in terms of those final evaluations. And so now we'll be inducing people today to make their best estimate of those things by actually Know looking at the details of people and setting the prices accordingly. So my proposal would be we rate people today on those prices today. So instead of looking at their list of publications or affiliations, you look at the actual price”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think most intellectuals, for example, think that if we look back two centuries, say, to intellectuals from two centuries ago and tried to look in detail at their research and how it influenced future research and which path it was on, we could much more accurately judge their actual deserved prestige. That is, who was actually on the right track, who actually helped, which will be different than what people at the time judged using the immediate indications of the time, at which position they had or which publications they had or things like that.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, what we do today is we take sort of acceptance by other academics recently as our best indication of their deserved prestige, that is, recent publications, recent job affiliation, institutional affiliations, recent invitations to speak, recent grants. We are today taking other impressive academics recent choices to affiliate with them as our best guesstimate of their prestige. I would say we could do better by creating betting markets in what the distant future will judge to have been their deserved prestige”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a history to that. And for the customers who want to be affiliated with impressive academics, which is what most of the customers want, students, journalists, and patrons, I think there's a better way of doing that, which I just wrote about in my second most recent blog post.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago, I started studying this topic exactly because this was my issue and this was many decades ago now. And I spent a long time. And my best guess still is prediction markets, betting markets. So if you as a research patron want to know the answer to a particular question like what's the mass of the electron neutrino, then what you can do is just subsidize a bedding market in that question, and that will induce more research into answering that question because the people who then answer that question can then make money in that betting market with the new information they gain. So that's a robust way to induce more information on a topic. If you want to induce an accomplishment, you can create prizes. And there's, of course, a long history of prizes to induce accomplishments. And we moved away from prizes, even though we once used them a far more often than we did today.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, there is a correlation. The question is just could we do this better some other way. Yes. And I think it's almost, I think it's pretty clear we could.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they might personally care, but they're stuck in an equilibrium. Wherein they basically most foundations like governments or research or like the Ford Foundation, they are the individuals they are rated based on the prestige they bring to that organization. Even if they might personally want to produce more intellectual progress, they are in a competitive game where they don't have tenure and they need to produce this prestige. And so once they give grant money to prestigious people, that is the thing that shows that they have achieved prestige for the organization. And that's what they need to do in order to retain their position.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other main customer is researcher patrons like the government or other foundations. And then the question is, are they getting their money worth out of the money they're paying for research to happen? And my analysis is they don't actually care about the research progress. They are mainly buying an affiliation with credentials impressiveness on the part of the researchers. They mainly pay money to researchers who are impressive and have impressive affiliations and they don't really much care what research project happens as a result.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are going to the universities, and are they getting their money's worth? Are they getting good value for that payment? So first of all, there's students. And the question is, are students getting good value for their education? And each person is getting value in the sense that they are identified and shown to be a more capable person, which is then worth more salary as an employee later. But there is a case for saying there's a big waste to the system because we aren't actually changing the students or educating them. We're more sorting them or labeling them. And that's a very expensive process to produce that outcome. And part of the expense is the freedom from tenure I get. So I feel like I can't be too proud of that because it's basically a tax on all these young students to pay this enormous amount of money in order to be labeled as better. Whereas I feel like we should be able to find cheaper ways of doing that.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that that can happen is the combination of these two things analogies. The one is that we have fierce competition to become a tenured professor, but then once you become tenured, we give you the freedom to do what you like. And that's a happenstance. It didn't have to be that way. And in many other walks of life, even though people have a lot of, you know, resources, et cetera, they don't have that kind of freedom set up. So I think we're kind of, I'm kind of lucky that tenure exists and that I'm enjoying it. But I can't be too enthusiastic about this unless I can approve of sort of the source of the resources that's paying for all this, right? So for the aristocrat, if you thought they stole it in war or something, you wouldn't be so pleased, whereas if you thought they had earned it or their ancestors had earned this money that they were spending as an aristocrat, then you could be more okay with that, right? So for universities, I have to ask, you know, where are the main sources of resources that...”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hear that centuries ago many scientists and intellectuals were aristocrats. They had time and could, if they chose, choose to be intellectuals. That's a feature of the combination that they had some source of resources that allowed them leisure and that the kind of competition they were faced in among aristocrats allowed that sort of a self-indulgence or self-pursuit at least at some point in their lives So, the analogous observation is that university professors often have sort of the freedom and space to do a wide range of things. And I am certainly enjoying that as a tenured professor.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm happy to blame the individual leaders in the sense that I might say what you should be trying to reform these institutions if you're just there to like get promoted and look good at being at the top but maybe I can blame you for your motives and your priorities in there but I can understand why the people at the top would be the people who are selected for having the priority of primarily trying to get to the top I get that”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the challenge is to try to produce better institutions. And as an academic, I'm aware that academia is particularly broken in the sense that we give people incentives to do research that's not very interesting or important because basically they're being impressive and we actually care more about whether academics are impressive than whether they're interesting or useful. I can go happy to go into detail with lots of different known institutions and their known institutional failings, ways in which those institutions produce incentives that are mistaken. And that was the point of the post we started with talking about the authorities. If I need to be seen as an authority, that's at odds with my being informative and I might choose to be the authority instead of being informative because that's my institutional incentives.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then perhaps to less blame individuals for winning their local institutional game and more blaming the world for having the wrong institutions. So economists are often wondering what other institutions we could have instead of the ones we have and which of them might promote better behavior. And this is a common thing we do all across human behavior is to think of what are the institutions we're in and what are the alternative variations we could imagine and then to say which institutions would be most productive. I would agree with you that our information institutions, that is the institutions by which we collect information and aggregate it and share it with people, are especially broken in the sense of far from the ideal of what would be the most cost effective way to collect and share information.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We often have a situation where we see a world of behavior and then we see ways in which particular behaviors are not sort of maximally socially useful We have a variety of reactions to that. So, one kind of reaction is just sort of morally blame each individual for not doing the Max Lecially useful thing. Under perhaps the idea that people could be identified and shamed for that and maybe induced into doing the better thing if only enough people were calling them out on it. But another way to think about it is to think that people sit in institutions with certain stable institutional structures and that institutions create particular incentives for individuals and that individuals are typically doing whatever is in their local interest in the context of that institution.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is core to sort of what it is to be an economist. I'm a professor of economics. There you go with the authority again. No, so it's about saying.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem is there's a conflict between being an authority or being seen as an authority and being maximally informative. That was the point of my blog post that you're pointing out to here. That is, if you look at it from their point of view, they won't long remain the perceived authority if they are too incautious about how they use that authority. And one of the ways to be incautious would be to be too informative.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the con is that if you think of yourself as the authority and asking what's my best strategy as an authority, it's unfortunately not to be maximally informative. So, you might think the ideal authority would not just tell you more than ignorance, it would tell you as much as possible. Okay, it would give you as much detail as you could possibly listen to and manage to assimilate. And it would update that as frequently as possible or as frequently as you were able to listen and assimilate. And that would be the maximally informative authority.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, if there were no authorities whatsoever, no accepted authorities, Then people would sort of have to sort of randomly pick different local authorities who would conflict with each other and then they'd maybe fighting each other about that or just not believe anybody and just do some initial default action that you would always do without responding to context. So the potential gain of an authority is that they could no more than just basic ignorance. And if people followed them, they could both be more informed than ignorance and all doing the same thing. So they're each protected from being accused or complained about. That's the idea of an authority. That would be the good idea.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, the authority can do more. I mean, so, for example, we just think about, I don't know, in a pandemic even, right? You could just think, oh, I'll just stay home and close all the doors, or I'll just ignore it, right? You could just think of just some very simple strategy that might be defensible if there were no authorities, right? But authorities might be able to know more than that. They might be able to look at some evidence, draw a more context-dependent conclusion, declare it as the authority's opinion, and then other people might follow that. And that could be better than doing nothing.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One standard function of authority is as something you can defer to respectively without needing to seem too submissive or ignorant or gullible. That is when you're asking what should I act on or what belief should I act on, you might be worried if I chose something too contrarian, too weird, too speculative that would make me look bad, so I would just choose something very conservative. So maybe an authority lets you choose something a little less conservative because the authority is your authorization. The authority will let you do it and you can say, and somebody says, why did you do that thing? And they say the authority authorized it. The authority tells me I should do this. Why aren't you doing it, right?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, if we look at most people and their physical appearance, clearly most people are trying to look somewhat nice, right? They shower, they shave, they comb their hair, but we certainly see some people around who are not trying to look so nice, right? Is that a big challenge, the hypothesis that people want to look nice? Not that much, right? We can see in those particular people's context more particular reasons why they've chosen to be an exception to the more general rule.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that can be explaining sort of the variety, right? Similarly, you might say, look, just look at most obvious things. Most people would like to look good, right? In the sense of physically, just you look good right now. You're wearing a nice suit. You have a haircut. You shaved, right? And we accept my.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The motivational hypotheses about these self-deceptions are in terms of how it makes you look to the people around you. Again, the press secretary. So the story would be most people want to look good to the people around them. For most people present themselves in ways that help them look good to the people around them. That's sufficient to say there would be a lot of it. It doesn't need to be 100%. There's enough variety in people and in circumstances that sometimes taking a contrary in strategy can be in the interest of some minority of the people. So, I might, for example, say that that's a strategy I've taken. I've decided that being contrarian on these things could be winning for me. That there's a room for a small number of people like me.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I will have to do as with a conspiracy theory analysis, and I'm saying, well, like, how long has this misperception been going on? How consistently has it happened around the world and across time? And I would have to say look, if we're talking about, say, a recent new product like Segway scooters or something, I could say not so many people have seen them or use them. Maybe they could be confused about their value. If we're talking about a product that's been around for thousands of years used in roughly the same way all across the world, and we see the same pattern over and over again, this sort of ignorance mistake just doesn't work so well.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where it would be the hardest to hide it because it's such a straightforward experiment done in a straightforward way that it's hard to manipulate. And that's where I will point you to to show you that there's relatively little correlation between alpha medicine. But even then, people could try to save the phenomenon and say, well, it's not hidden motives, it's just ignorance. They could say, for example, Know medicine's complicated. Most people don't know the literature. Therefore, they can be excused for ignorance. They are just ignorantly assuming that medicine is effective. It's not that they have some other motive that they're trying to achieve.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ask you to consider the possibility that the literature is biased in that when the evidence isn't as reliable, when they have more degrees of freedom in order to get the answer they want, they do tend to get the answer they want. But when we get to the kind of evidence that's much harder to mess with, that's where we will see the truth be more revealed. So with respect to medicine, we have millions of papers published in medicine over the years, most of which give the impression that medicine is useful. There's a small literature on randomized experiments of the aggregate effects of medicine, where there's maybe a few half dozen or so papers.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in many areas of academia, including health economics, the researchers there also want to support the usual points of view. And so they will have selection effects in their publications and their analysis whereby they, if they're getting a result too much contrary to the usual point of view everybody wants to have, they will file, draw that paper or redo the analysis until they get an answer that's more to people's liking. So that means in the health economics literature, there are plenty of people who will claim that, in fact, we have evidence that medicine is effective And when I respond, I will have to point you to our most reliable evidence.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will just be a general feature of this. So, in order, if I say, you know, there's this usual story about why we go to the doctor and then there's this other explanation, you know, it'll be true that you'll have to look at wider data in order to see that because people don't usually offer excuses unless in the local context of their excuse they can get away with it. That is, it's hard to tell, right? So, in the case of medicine, I have to point you to sort of larger sets of data.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's going to be an obstacle to proving that hypothesis if you are focused on sort of the local data that a person would typically have if they were challenged. So if you're just looking at one kid and his lack of homework Maybe you can't tell whether his dog ate his homework or not if you happen to know he doesn't have a dog. Might have more confidence, right? You will need to have a wider range of evidence than a typical person would when they're encountering that actual excuse in order to seep past the excuse.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when a child tries to explain why they don't have their homework assignment, They are sometimes inclined to say the dog ate my homework. They almost never say the dragon ate my homework. The reason is the dragon is completely implausible explanation, almost always when we make excuses for things, we choose things that are, at least in some degree, plausible. It could perhaps have happened. That's an obstacle for any explanation of a hidden motive or a hidden feature of human behavior if people are pretending one thing while really doing another, they're usually going to pick as a pretense something that's somewhat plausible.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In principle, it does, but actually it's a lot easier than you might think. I think the biggest limitation is just the willingness to consider alternative hypotheses. So many of the patterns that you need to rely on are actually pretty obvious simple patterns. You just have to notice them and ask yourself, how can I explain those? Often you don't need to look at the most subtle, most difficult statistical evidence that might be out there, the simplest patterns are often enough.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, now, in almost every industry, producers are in general happy to lie and exaggerate in order to get more customers. This is true of auto repair as much as human body repair and medicine. So the differences between these industries can't be explained by the willingness of the producers to give customers what they want or to do various things that we have to again go to the customers. Why are customers treating body repair different than auto repair?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it turns out that in general, it's usually much easier to explain producer behavior than consumer behavior, that is, the drug companies or the doctors have relatively clear incentives to give the customers whatever they want. And similarly, say governments and democratic countries have the incentive to give the voters what they want. So that focuses your attention on the patient and the voter in this equation and saying, what do they want? They would be driving the rest of the system. Whatever they want, the other parties are willing to give them in order to get paid. So now we're looking for puzzles in patient and voter behavior. What are they choosing and why do they choose that?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we have a method that we use in our book that is what I recommend for people to use in all these sorts of topics. The straightforward method is first, don't look at yourself. Look at other people. Look at broad patterns of behavior in other people and then ask, what are the various theories we could have to explain these patterns of behavior? And then just do the simple matching which theory better matches the behavior they have. And the last step is to assume that's true of YouTube. Don't assume you're an exception. If you happen to be an exception, that won't go so well. But nevertheless, on average, you aren't very well positioned to judge if you're an exception. Look at what other people do, explain what other people do, and assume that's YouTube.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are some things that would? The key thing is medicine is much less useful health wise than you think. So, you know, if you're focused on your health, you would. Care a lot less about it. And if you were focused on other people's health, you would also care a lot less about it. But if medicine is, as we suggest, more about showing that you care and let other people showing that they care about you, then a lot of priority on medicine can make sense. So that was our very earliest discussion in the podcast. You were talking about should you give people a lot of medicine when it's not very effective? And then the answer then is, well, that's the way that you show that you care about them and you really want them to know you care, then maybe that's what you need to do. If you can't find a cheaper, more effective substitute.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to impress the very most highest quality minds, that's such a small sample and they can't do that much for you anyway. So, I might well have had more ordinary success in life, be more popular, invited to more parties, make more money if I had targeted a lower tier set of intellectuals with the standards they have. For some reason, I decided early on that Einstein was my audience, or people like him. And I was going to impress them.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hanging out with Tyler Cohen a lot and trash. Sure. I mean, try to convince him of stuff. You know, and you might think, you know, from the point of view of just making money or having sex or other sorts of things, this is misdirected energy.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think intellectuals have to vary. One of the main ways intellectuals varies in who is their audience in their mind. Who are they trying to impress? Is it the people down the hall? Is it people who are reading their Twitter feed? Is it their parents? Is it their high school teacher? Right. Or is it Einstein and Freud and Socrates, right? So I think those of us who are especially arrogant, especially think that we're really big shot or have a chance at being a really big shot, we were naturally going to pick the... Big shot audience that we can. We're going to be trying to impress Socrates and Einstein.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the Standards you hold yourself to. Are dependent on the audience you have in mind So, if you think of your audience as relatively easily fooled or relatively gullible, then you won't bother to generate more complicated, deep arguments and structures and evidence to persuade somebody who has higher standards because why bother? You can get away with something much easier. And of course, if you are, say, a salesperson, you make money on sales, then you don't need to convince the top few percent of the most sharp customers. You can just go for the bottom 60% of the most gullible customers and make plenty of sales, right?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, of course, you know, you could say, well, you could get all this attention by making false claims of dramatic improvement. And then wouldn't that be much easier than actually working through all the details?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source