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

“A plausible time for that. I mean, it would have to happen very early in Earth's history because we see life early in history. And a plausible time could have been during this stellar nursery where the sun was born with many other stars in the same close proximity, with lots of rocks flying around, able to move things from one place to another. If I rock with life on it from some rock, planet with life came into that stellar nursery, it plausibly could have seeded many planets in that stellar nursery, all at the same time. They're all born at the same time and the same place, pretty close to each other.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much higher than the usual murder trial, plenty high enough that strong physical evidence could put you over the top to think it's more likely than not. But I'm not an expert on that physical evidence. I'm going to leave that part to someone else. I'm going to say the prior is pretty high. This isn't a crazy scenario. So then I can elaborate on where my prior comes from. What scenario could make most sense of this data? My scenario to make sense has two main parts. First is panspermia siblings. So panspermia is the process by which life might have arrived on Earth from elsewhere.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On average, if we say, what's the chance anyone person murdered another person as a prior probability, maybe one in a thousand people get murdered, maybe each person has a thousand people around them who could plausibly have done it. So the prior probability of a murder is one in a million. But we allow murder trials because often evidence is sufficient to overcome a one in a million prior because the evidence is often strong enough, right? My guess, rough guess for the UFOs as aliens scenario. Some of them is the prior's roughly one in a”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will establish myself as somewhat of an expert on the prior. I would say my studies and the things I've studied make me an expert and I should stand up and have an opinion on that be able to explain it. The likelihood, however, is not my area of expertise. That is, I'm not a pilot, I don't do atmospheric studies of things I haven't studied in detail, the various kinds of atmospheric phenomena or whatever that might be used to explain the particular sightings. I can just say from my amateur stance, the sightings look damn puzzling They do not look easy to dismiss. The attempts I've seen to easily dismiss them seem to me to fail. It seems like these are pretty puzzling weird stuff that deserve an expert's attention. Terms of considering asking what the likelihood is. So, an analogy I would make is a murder trial.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to do some clearing of throats, which people like to do on this topic. They want to make sure you understand they're saying this and not that, right? So I would say the analysis needs both a prior and a likelihood. So the prior is what are the scenarios that are at all plausible in terms of what we know about the universe? And then the likelihood is the particular actual sightings, like how hard are those to explain through various means”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giant long exactly Those hops require that you are able to start a colonization of sorts along those hops, right? You have to be able to stop somewhere, make it into a way station such that you can then support you moving farther.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relatively short. It's also true that traveling over very long distances probably one of the main ways to make that feasible is that you land somewhere, you colonize a bit, you create new resources that can then allow you to go farther.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The time delay between when the first thing might arrive and then when colonists could arrive in mass and do a mass amount of work is cosmologically short. You know, in human history, of course, sure, there might be a century between that, but a century is just a tiny amount of time on the scales we're talking about.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just talking about the timing, they arose at some point in space time. Right. And it's very unlikely that that was just at a point that they could just barely get here recently. Almost surely.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They couldn't just be right at the edge. Very unlikely, most likely they would have been around waiting for us for a long time. They could have come here anytime in the last millions of years and they just chosen, they've been waiting around for this or they just chose to come recently. But the timing coincidence, it would be crazy unlikely that they just happened to be able to get here, say, in the last 100 years. They would no doubt have been able to get here far earlier than that.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the timing coincidence is it's almost surely if they are here now, they are much older than us. They are many millions of years older than us. And so they could have filled the galaxy in that last millions of years if they had wanted to.”
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 if UFOs, some of them are aliens, what kind of aliens would they be? This is sort of a key question you have to ask in order to try to interpret that scenario. The key fact we would know is that they are here right now, but the universe around us is not full of an alien civilization. So that says right off the bat that they chose not to allow massive expansion of a gravy civilization.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let me reverse my position a little because I'll say, well, the Hello Aliens question really combines two different scenarios that we're slipping over. One scenario would be that the Hello Aliens would be like grabby aliens. They would be just fully advanced. They would have been expanding for millions of years. They would have a very advance civilization. And then they would finally be arriving here after a billion years perhaps of expanding, in which case they're going to be crazy advanced at some maximal level. The hollow aliens about aliens we might meet soon, which might be sort of UFO aliens. And UFO aliens probably are not grabby aliens.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once they had maxed out on all communication technology in general and they just understood in general how to communicate with lots of things and had done that for millions of years.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so then the question is, is it even possible to communicate across some cultural different distances? And I might think, yeah, I could imagine some maybe advanced aliens who've become so weird and different from each other. They can't communicate with each other. But we're probably pretty simple compared to them. So I would think, sure, if they wanted to, they could communicate with us.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also gets to the nature of how advanced you expect them to be. So I think some people see that we have advanced over the last thousands of years and we aren't reaching any sort of limit. And so they tend to assume it could go on forever. And I actually tend to think that within, say, 10 million years, we will sort of max out on technology. We will sort of learn everything that's feasible to know for the most part. And then obstacles to understanding would more be about sort of cultural differences, ways in which different places had just chosen to do things differently.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They didn't have a coordinated large scale wars in the way it's chimpanzees do. Chimpanzees do have wars between one tribe of chimpanzees and another's, but human foragers did not. Farmers returned to that, of course. The more chimpanzee-like styles.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100% obvious. So we know again, we know a fair bit about what Foragers' lives were like. The main sort of violence they had would be sexual jealousy. They were relatively promiscuous, and so there'd be a lot of jealousy. But they did not have organized wars with each other. That is, they were at peace with their neighboring forger bands. They didn't have property in land or even in people. They didn't really have marriage. And so they were, in fact, peaceful.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All these trends are basically explained by becoming more forager like. And much science fiction celebrates this Star Trek or the culture novels. People like this image that we are moving toward this world. We're basically like foragers. We're peaceful. We share. We make decisions collectively. We have a lot of free time. We are into art.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're all rich enough to be able to afford that sort of thing. And therefore, she's more inclined often to go with her inclinations or sort of more natural inclinations about such things rather than to be pressured to follow the official farming norms of that you shouldn't do that sort of thing. And all through our lives, we have been drifting back toward forager attitudes because we've been getting rich. And so aside from at work, which is an exception, but elsewhere, I think this explains trends toward less slavery, more democracy, less religion, less fertility, more promiscuity, more travel, more art, more leisure, fewer work hours.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the pressures that made foragers into farmers were a part mediated by poverty. Farmers were poor. And if they deviated from the farming norms that people around them supported, they were quite at risk of starving to death. And then in the last few centuries, we've gotten rich. As we've gotten rich, the social pressures that turned forgers into farmers have become less Less persuasive to us. So, for example, a farming young woman who was told if you have a child out of wedlock, you and your child may starve, that was a credible threat. She would see actual examples around her to make that a believable threat. Today, if you say to a young woman, you shouldn't have a child out of wedlock, she will see other young women around her doing okay.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last few centuries as we get rich. So the idea is we spent a million years being a forager, and that was a very sort of standard lifestyle that we know a lot about. Foragers live in small bands. make decisions cooperatively, they share food, they don't have much property, et cetera. And humans liked that. And then 10,000 years ago, farming became possible. But it was only possible because we were plastic enough to really change our culture. Farming styles and cultures are very different. They have slavery. They have war, they have property, they have inequality, they have kings. They stay in one place instead of wandering. They don't have as much diversity of experience or food. They have more disease. Farming life is just very different. But humans were able to sort of introduce conformity in religion and all sorts of things to become just a very different kind of creature as farmers. Farmers are just really different than foragers in terms of their values and their lives.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So if you look on, say, the last thousand years or 10,000 years, we could say we've seen a certain rate at which people are willing to make big destruction in terms of war. Okay. And if you're willing to project that data forward, then I think if you want to ask over periods of thousands or tens of thousands of years, you would have a reasonable data set. So the key question is, what's changed lately? And so a big question of which I've given a lot of thought to what are the major changes that seem to have happened in culture and human attitudes over the last few centuries and what's our best explanation for those so that we can project them forward into the future? And I have a story about that, which is the story that we have been drifting back toward forger attitudes.”
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 part of this just has to think about ask you what your time scales you're looking at, right? So if you say if you look at the history of war, we've had a lot of wars pretty consistently over many centuries. So if I ask, if you ask, will we have a nuclear war in the next 50 years, I might say, well, probably not. If I say 500 or 5,000 years, like if the same sort of risks are underlying and they just continue, then you have to add that up over time and think the risk is getting a lot larger the longer a time scale we're looking at.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is a common and useful intellectual strategy to take something that could be really big but is often very small and fit the distribution of the data to small things, which you have a lot of them, and then ask, do I believe the big things are really that different, right? I see. Sometimes it's reasonable to say, like, say, with tornadoes or even pandemics or something, the underlying process might not be that different. But that's a high possible ones.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we can see the power law, we can do a power law fit to the rate of wars, and it's a power law with a thick tail. So it's one of those things that. You should expect most of the damage to be in the few biggest ones. So that's also true for pandemics and a few other things. For pandemics, most of the damage is in the few biggest ones. The median pandemic so far is less than the average that you should expect 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
“So, the problem is war is a process that has a very long tail. That is, there are rare, very large wars. So the average is much worse than the median war. Because of this long tail. And that makes it hard to identify trends over time. So the median war has clearly gone way down in the last century than a median rate of war. But it could be that's because the tail has gotten thicker. And in fact, the average war is just as bad, but most wars are going to be big wars. So that's the thing we're not so sure about.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the biggest datum here is that we've had an enormous decline in major war over the last century. So that has to be taken into account now.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, clearly, it has had an effect. The question is just how strong an effect for how long. I mean, clearly we have not gone wild with nuclear war and clearly the devastation that you would get if you initiated nuclear war is part of the reasons people have been reluctant to start a war. The question is just how reliably will that ensure the absence of a war?”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that's just wrong. I think you could rise again after a nuclear war. It might take 10,000 years or 100,000 years, but it could rise again.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people are discounting ocean worlds too much. That is, I think people tend to assume that whatever we did must be the only way it's possible and I think people aren't giving enough credit for other possible paths.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But an interesting question about oceans is that, okay, remember I told you about how most planets would last for trillions of years and be later, right? So people have tried to explain why life appeared on Earth by saying, oh, all those planets are going to be unqualified for life because of various problems. That is, they're around smaller stars, which last longer and smaller stars have some things like more solar flares, maybe more tidal locking. Almost all these problems with longer lived planets aren't problems for ocean worlds. And a large fraction of planets out there are ocean worlds. So if life can appear on an ocean world, then that pretty much ensures that these planets that last a very long time could have advanced life because most, you know, there's a huge fraction of ocean worlds.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's still large economies do better. Like large cities grow better than small cities, large integrated economies like the United States or the European Union do better than small fragmented ones.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something called rot that I've thought a lot about, which is one of the problems with even a world government, which is large systems of software today just consistently rot and decay with time and have to be replaced. And that plausibly also is a problem for other large systems, including biological systems, legal systems, regulatory systems. And it seems like large species actually don't evolve as effectively as small ones do. And that's an important thing to notice about. And that's actually different from ordinary sort of evolution in economies on Earth in the last few centuries. On the more technical evolution and economic growth happens in larger integrated cities and nations. But in biology, it's the other way around. More evolution happened in the fragmented species.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story that I understand is about small niches. So speciation can be promoted by having multiple different species. So in the ocean, species are larger. That is, there are more creatures in each species because the ocean environments don't vary as much. So if you're good in one place, you're good in many other places. But on land, especially in rivers, rivers contain an enormous percentage of the kinds of species on land. You see, because they vary so much from place to place. And so a species can be good in one place and then other species can't really compete because they came from a different place where things are different. So it's a remarkable fact, actually, that speciation promotes evolution in the long run, that is more evolution has happened on land because there have been more species on land, because each species has been smaller. And that's actually a warning about”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Does look like there's an advantage if you have males, then the males can take higher variants. And so there can be stronger selection among the males. Have higher variants in their mating success”
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 question in evolution of life on Earth. There are very few species that have more than two genders. There are some, but they aren't very many. But there's an enormous number of species that do have two genders, much more than one. And so there's literature on why did multiple genders evolve and then sort of what's the point of having males and females versus hermaphrodites. So most plants are hermaphrodites. That is, they have they would mate male female, but each plant can be either role. And then most animals have chosen to split into males and females. And then they're differentiating the two genders. And there's an interesting set of questions about why that happens.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It might be squishy and made out of hydrocarbons, but it would be artificial in the sense of made in factories with designs on CAD things, right? Factories with scale economy. So the factories we have made on Earth today have much larger scale economies than the factories in our cells. So the factories in our cells are marvels, but they don't achieve very many scale economies. They're tiny little factories.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are. But the key thing is we're making predictions that I think are somewhat robust about what our distant descendants will be like. Another thing I think you would automatically accept is they will almost entirely be artificial. And I think that would be the obvious prediction about any aliens we would meet. That is, they would long since have given up reproducing biologically. Well, it's all.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and they will be thoughtful about that. They will have thought about what counts as a descendant, and that'll be important to them to have the right concept.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but so that's the whole point. When the world gets more complicated, and there are many possible strategies, it's having that as your abstract preference that will force you to think through those possibilities and pick the one that's most effective.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not just prefer consciously and abstractly prefer. That is, it won't be the indirect consequence of other preference. It will just be the thing they know they want.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did induce us to have more descendants. That's why we're here. But those packages of preferences are not a robust way to promote having more descendants. They were tied to our ancestral environment, which is no longer true. So that's one of the reasons we are now having a big fertility decline, because in our current environment, our ancestral preferences are not inducing us to have a lot of kids, which is from evolution's point of view, a big mistake. We can predict that in the longer run there will arise creatures who just abstractly know that what they want is more descendants. That's a very robust way to have more descendants is to have that as your direct preference.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is at the moment we reproduce as the result of a hodgepodge of preferences that aren't very well integrated, but sort of in our ancestral environment induced us to reproduce. So we have preferences over being sleepy and hungry and thirsty and wanting to have sex and wanting to be excitement, et cetera, right? And so in our ancestral environment, the packages of preferences that we evolved to have.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something that would affect all of your descendants. Then if you take that risk, you might have more descendants, but you might have zero. And that's just really bad to have zero descendants. But an uncorrelated risk would be a risk that some of your descendants would suffer, but others wouldn't. And then you have a portfolio of descendants. And so that portfolio ensures you against problems with any one of them.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually have analysis of the ideal risk preferences too. So there's a literature on ideal preferences that evolution should promote. And for example, there's a literature on competing investment funds and what the managers of those funds should care about in terms of risk, various kinds of risks, and in terms of discounting. managers of investment funds should basically have logarithmic risk, i.e. in shared risk, in correlated risk, but be very risk neutral with respect to uncorrelated risk. So that's a feature that's predicted to happen about individual personal choices in biology, and also for investment funds. So that's other things. That's also something we can say about the long run.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, if evolution rewards creatures for having many descendants, then if you have decisions that influence how many descendants you have, then that would be good if you made those decisions. But in order to do that, you'll have to care about them. You'll have to care about that future.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And futurists find it hard to motivate people and to engage people about the long-term future because they just don't care that much. But that's a side effect of this particular way that our preferences evolved about the future. And so in the future, they will neglect the future less. And that's an interesting thing that we can predict robustly. Eventually, maybe a few centuries, maybe longer, eventually our descendants will care about the future.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's a side effect of the way our preferences evolved as sexually selected creatures, we should expect that in the longer run, creatures will evolve who don't discount the future. They will care about the long run, and they will therefore not neglect the wrong. So, for example, for things like global warming or things like that, at the moment many commenters are sad that basically ordinary people don't seem to care much, market prices don't seem to care much, and ordinary people it doesn't really impact them much because humans don't care much about the long-term future.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, that's a factor of four later. Because it's later. So this actually explains typical interest rates in the economy, that is, interest rates are greatly influenced by our discount rates. And we basically discount the future by a factor of two progeneration.”
2022-06-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #292 – Robin Hanson: Alien Civilizations, UFOs, and the Future of Humanity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source