Astral Codex Ten

Hanson

6 min read

Hanson

Article

Hanson is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 27, 2021 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Hanson and Scholl tried the same analysis and got the same result”; “Hanson’s old arguments”; “I don’t see Hanson responding to my main point, which is that the insurance experiments show signs of having their power fail at random points in the causal chain”. It most often appears alongside AI, CATO Unbound, Elon Musk.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: July 27, 2021
  • Last seen: May 29, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
July 27, 2021 · Original source
I guess I can’t accuse Acemoglu of not reading the paper, given that he wrote it. Still, I think this result is pretty typical of the literature. Hanson and Scholl tried the same analysis and got the same result (paper, MR article). This has made me much more skeptical of a current AI unemployment problem than I was a few years ago.
Inline links: paper, MR article
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
Previously in series: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors Prelude: Yudkowsky Contra Hanson In 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of AI.
Inline links: Yudkowsky Contra Ngo On Agents, Yudkowsky Contra Cotra On Biological Anchors, Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky
In 2008, thousands of blog readers - including yours truly, who had discovered the rationality community just a few months before - watched Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky on the future of AI.
Inline links: Robin Hanson debate Eliezer Yudkowsky
For transhumanists, this debate has a kind of iconic status, like Lincoln-Douglas or the Scopes Trial. But Robin’s ideas seem a bit weird now (they also seemed a bit weird in 2008) - he thinks AIs will start out as uploaded human brains, and even wrote an amazing science-fiction-esque book of predictions about exactly how that would work. Since machine learning has progressed a lot faster than brain uploading has, this is looking less likely and probably makes his position less relevant than in 2008. The gradualist torch has passed to Paul Christiano, who wrote a 2018 post Takeoff Speeds revisiting some of Hanson’s old arguments and adding new ones.
Inline links: even wrote an amazing science-fiction-esque book of predictions about exactly how that would work, Takeoff Speeds
Response to Hanson On Health Care
April 30, 2024 · Original source
Robin Hanson replied here to my original post challenging him on health care here.
Inline links: replied here, challenging him on health care here
We seem pretty clear to me there. There’s also my 2007 article Cut Medicine in Half where I say:
Inline links: Cut Medicine in Half
My impression is that Robin has very clearly rejected this position. For example, from here:
Inline links: here:
Highlights From The Comments On Hanson And Health Care
May 10, 2024 · Original source
Most recent post here.
Inline links: here
A friend referred me to your discussion about the effect of health insurance on health -- thanks for discussing my paper on taxpayer outreach with Lurie and McCubbin! I looked at the response by Hanson to your post and wanted to flag some things he wrote about our paper that I think are off base.
Inline links: response
3: Comparing OLS and IV results. I really didn't understand what point Hanson was trying to make here. In this context, OLS means comparing mortality among people who enroll in more months of health insurance to people who enroll in less. Differences in health insurance enrollment are non-random though, so we don't put much weight on the OLS estimate. Why would we be concerned that our 95% confidence intervals for the IV and OLS estimates don't overlap? Note also that the OLS standard errors are much smaller not because of a type-o in the table but because they are estimated from a different source of variation.
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
20: Related: good discussion of Lindley’s Paradox in the comments of the Hanson/medicine post, from Limelihood and Radford Neal. My understand: the paradox only causes problems if you assume the true effect is quite likely to be zero. Then if you get an effect of (let’s say) 0.1, you think “nah, it’s probably just zero with some noise”. This is a hackish way of representing the idea of “the null hypothesis”. But since the effect of health insurance is probably not exactly zero (it probably comes from some benefit of good treatments, minus some cost of bad treatments) we probably don’t have to worry. I might be explaining it wrong, read the comments.
Inline links: Limelihood, Radford Neal