Astral Codex Ten

Robin Hanson

53 min read

Robin Hanson

Article

Robin Hanson is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 35 times across 35 issues between July 12, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Robin Hanson has long said that if he had a million dollars, the first thing he would do is subsidize fire-company-CEO markets”; “Writing the post made me think a lot of Robin Hanson’s idea of “pulling policy ropes sideways""; “the average programmer (who follows Robin Hanson’s Twitter, so maybe an early adopter)“. It most often appears alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, Metaculus, Tyler Cowen.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 35
  • Issue count: 35
  • First seen: July 12, 2021
  • Last seen: March 03, 2026

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.

Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting
July 12, 2021 · Original source
I think I bite these bullets. First of all, of course there should be fire-the-head-of-a-military-school prediction markets! Robin Hanson has long said that if he had a million dollars, the first thing he would do is subsidize fire-company-CEO markets. Why not give him a billion instead, and have him extend it to military school principals?
Inline links: subsidize fire-company-CEO markets
Things I Learned Writing The Lockdown Post
July 21, 2021 · Original source
Writing the post made me think a lot of Robin Hanson's idea of "pulling policy ropes sideways". The idea is, the Democrats and Republicans (or whoever) are in a giant tug-of-war over some issue, like looser or stricter lockdowns. There are so many people pulling, on both sides, that you adding your efforts to one side or the other will barely matter. Meanwhile, if you pull the ropes sideways - try to make a difference in some previously unexplored direction that nobody is fighting - you can often have much more effect, plus there's no reason to think that the direction everyone is fighting over is the most interesting direction anyway.
Inline links: pulling policy ropes sideways
21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
Hence the market above: how frequently will the average programmer (who follows Robin Hanson’s Twitter, so maybe an early adopter) use Codex in 2026?
Maybe Metaculans don’t understand how strong a claim they’re making here? Or they’re expecting response bias on Hanson’s poll? Or who knows, maybe they think a decent fraction of programmers will be using this a decent fraction of the time five years out.
Links For November
November 25, 2021 · Original source
32: Last spring Robin Hanson and others mooted the idea that viral load affected disease severity; eg if you inhaled one coronavirus particle, you’d get a mild coronvirus case, but if you inhaled 100,000, you’d get a severe case. I hadn’t realized that the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine published an article in October saying maybe this might be true (though not providing any new evidence). This sparked responses by other people saying maybe it might be false (also not providing evidence) - honestly the whole thing was weirdly centered around PR (“if we say this is true, it might make people like masks more!”, “but if we say it’s false, that could make people like vaccines more!”). The only useful thing I got out of this is that Stephan Guyenet looked into a pathogen load/severity correlation for diarrhea and found there was none.
Inline links: saying maybe this might be true, Stephan Guyenet looked into
Mantic Monday: Let Me Google That For You
December 20, 2021 · Original source
One of Robin Hanson’s original dreams for prediction markets was conditional markets that could help set policy. For example “If we choose a left-wing Education Minister, what will test scores be in five years?” vs. “If we choose a right-wing Education Minister, what will test scores be in five years?” and then we have a good guess as to whether the left-wingers or right-wingers have better education policy on this axis.
1: Richard Hanania interviews Robin Hanson, inventor of prediction markets.
Inline links: interviews Robin Hanson
There's A Time For Everyone
January 12, 2022 · Original source
This is the title image of Robin Hanson’s Overcoming Bias, a blog my bride and I both read. The Greek hero Odysseus is sailing through Siren-infested waters. He knows that the Sirens have hypnotic powers, and that anyone who hears their song will stop thinking straight and probably steer their boat into a rock or something. So before the Sirens appear, he ties himself to the mast, so that the future version of himself who hears the Siren song can’t screw anything up. Hanson uses it as a general symbol of thoughtful precommitment, of taking steps to constrain future selves who might have values unaligned with yours. Marriage - and any other contract - is a deliberate effort to constrain your future actions so that you can make long-term plans that heavily affect other people - your spouse, but also your future children - without them having to constantly worry about you running off to any Siren you hear.
Inline links: Overcoming Bias
Why Do I Suck?
February 02, 2022 · Original source
It still is! But in the same sense that I was clearing a personal backlog of unwritten-up ideas, the rationalist community was clearing a backlog of scientific and philosophical ideas sitting in journals or obscure old books that it turned out were really interesting to a lot of people. The early Internet provided a critical mass where people interested in cognition and math and the future could suddenly all share the parts of the puzzle they knew about with each other and make rapid progress. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom, and other intellectuals all had their own backlog of stuff which had probably been published in journals or something but which the wider world had yet to appreciate. I was the biggest-name blogger who was sitting around listening to them talk about it, so I got access to a stream of amazing content that most people didn’t know about.
What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
March 04, 2022 · Original source
Here’s one scenario which I think is unlikely but theoretically possible: the formal study of rationality will end up having zero advantages over well-practiced intuitive truth-seeking, except insofar as it allowed Robin Hanson to design prediction markets, which someday take over the world. This would be a common pattern for sciences: much worse at everyday tasks than people who do them intuitively, until it generates some surprising and powerful new technology. Democritus figured out what matter was made of in 400 BC, and it didn’t help a single person do a single useful thing with matter for the next 2000 years of followup research, and then you got the atomic bomb (I may be skipping over all of chemistry, sorry).
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March 14, 2022 · Original source
2: More people make Ukraine predictions: Maxim Lott, Richard Hanania (again), Samo Burja (again), EHarding (possibly trolling?), Robin Hanson (sort of)
Inline links: Maxim Lott, Richard Hanania, Samo Burja, EHarding, Robin Hanson
Yudkowsky Contra Christiano On AI Takeoff Speeds
April 04, 2022 · Original source
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
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
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
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd (hamish.todd1@gmail.com) Date: May 21 Time: 2:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F426439+J9 Location: The Bath House - I'll have a Peter Singer and a Robin Hanson book on the table
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F426439+J9
Book Review: The Gervais Principle
May 10, 2022 · Original source
Most people have a special place in their heart for the book that first made them understand the idea of status economics. Gervais Principle does a good enough job with this that I’m sure it had a profound effect on some people. For me, that role was already taken by an unusually good college psych textbook, plus Robin Hanson’s blogging as remedial lessons, so I feel less transformed.
Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy
June 24, 2022 · Original source
It is very much an academic book that should revolutionise the whole field of IR by challenging the fundamental assumption of realpolitik with impressive rigour, so the brisk 200 pages should probably be mandatory reading for IR/political science freshmen. Like Robin Hanson, I would have been persuaded by an article length analysis, but as Hanania himself agrees, the belabouring book length treatment is to disabuse academics who by nature demand sweat and impressive mastery of literatures — this review should, dare I say, suffice for the cynical reader.
Inline links: Robin Hanson, Hanania
The press should include Tetlock’s superforecasting/prediction markets when reporting the forecasts by the military and national security bureaucracy at public interviews, official reports, and congressional testimony 7. Conclusion And Further Readings Gordon Tullock, one of the founding fathers of public choice theory who coined “rent-seeking”, has always wished for a book like this, and now it exists. It is clear to me that Hanania’s public choice model should usurp the conventional unitary actor model, and any scholar who insists on American grand strategy is deluding themselves. The book hasn’t been reviewed by mainstream outlets (which probably only reviews “pop” nonfiction), but have been unanimously praised by scholars in adjacent fields: Steven Pinker praised it as “cynical but probably accurate”; Robin Hanson was “quite impressed”, Byran Caplan, whose work The Myth of the Rational Voter was cited extensively by Hanania, praised it as “eye-opening”; Tyler Cowen praised the book as impressive in spite of finding Hanania’s view to be more sceptical than his own — a sentiment I share after reading about the East Asian economic miracle (the greatest anti-poverty program in history) facilitated by American intervention in How Asia Works (another contrarian economics-related work I’ve reviewed). Russian Invasion of Ukraine At the time of writing, Russia is invading Ukraine, so it is interesting to see how well the public choice model’s predictions fit. Indeed, the unitary actor model can describe autocratic states to some degree — to understand Russia we only have to get into the head of Putin (the model still falls short in accounting for the oligarchs who run the mafia state). Ukraine is central to Putin’s ideology and subjectively important to Russian society, and the desire to obliterate and absorb the nation of Ukraine far predates the history of NATO (see also Adam Tooze’s excellent essay on understanding Russia as a strategic petrostate). As Hanania writes on his Substack (worthy of your subscription, by the way)4: We know what the Russians want. They have made clear, openly and consistently, that they do not want NATO to keep expanding. When it became apparent in December that an invasion was on the table, the US started a diplomatic process that has involved trying to work out concessions on other things, while refusing to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table. Putin has become Satan in liberal imagination, and when it comes to the culture war, the emotional response is overwhelming. Hanania writes: Brexit, Trump, and the rise of Orban and other right-wing populists in Europe have helped solidify a narrative in which Russian hackers and influence operations are behind everything liberal elites find distasteful, from opposition to Syrian refugees to bans on Critical Race Theory. Here’s a website laying out all the things Russia has been accused of “weaponizing” in the media, including dolphins, federalism, and the weather. The details of debates surrounding the wisdom of NATO expansion and whether Ukraine actually matters to the United States are lost in the larger story, as emotional denunciations of Putin as the source of all anti-democratic activity drives attitudes and policies. Inconvenient facts are ignored because it’s not really about “democracy,” “international law,” or any of the other words they use to obscure the fact that it’s culture wars all the way down. And the Western response is driven by extreme public outcry to an unprecedented extent: It’s all a competition to see who can signal “I hate Putin” the most, but Germany was still shutting down all its nuclear power plants to rely on Russian gas despite warnings from every other EU state (Russia accounts for 40% of Europe’s gas imports) — so much for grand strategy. That is not to excuse Putin’s invasion (he is, after all, the aggressor) and no, Ukraine is not “the West’s fault” as Mearsheimer has claimed in his viral lecture, but “NATO’s door remains open” for me and “we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence” for thee is no grand strategy at all. Indeed, the irrational Western response is not predictable by the unitary actor model, but by the public choice model. Hanania writes: If you were going to cut Russia off from SWIFT, for example, why wouldn’t you announce it beforehand? The whole point of a punishment like that is supposed to be its deterrent effect, but if you don’t communicate that a specific action will happen, then it can’t influence behaviour. The answer here seems to be a lack of grand strategy, with leaders responding to events according to emotion and public relations more than anything. Cutting off SWIFT, or even threatening to do so, seems extreme before an invasion occurs, but not after it has begun. The West cannot rely on sanctions to make Russia abandon its core national security interests, which at the very least include a no-NATO commitment, the acceptance of the secession of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the recognition of the annexation of Crimea. Sanctions will also push Putin closer to Beijing, and the US will continue down the self-defeating path of alienating both of the other two superpowers — so much for American grand strategy. Hanania writes: Even if Putin has maximalist aims at this point, that doesn’t mean sanctions are worth doing. Their costs are high and they may have major consequences for the global economy. One has to consider the possibility that they make Russia more repressive at home and more brutal in its persecution of the war. Putin is getting sanctioned, but ordinary Russians are getting cancelled. The Metropolitan Opera of New York has announced it will no longer stage performers who have supported Russian President Vladimir Putin. Carnegie Hall has done the same, and the Royal Opera House in London is cancelling a planned Bolshoi Ballet residency (one of the oldest and most prestigious ballet companies in the world). Eurovision banned Russia. Tchaikovsky is cancelled. As Tyler Cowen writes, cancel culture against Russians is the new McCarthyism. The culture war has morphed into a hyperreal form on the Internet. Just as COVID is the first pandemic in the Age of Twitter, so the Ukraine invasion is, in some sense, the first war in the Age of Twitter. As it unfolds, we are seeing many disturbing parallels to the events of early 2020. People are rapidly normalising once-fringe ideas like a NATO-enforced no-fly zone (while completely oblivious to the fact that it means shooting down Russian planes and causing WW3), direct US conflict with Russia, regime change in Moscow, and even, incredibly, the use of nuclear weapons. The overnight flips on German defence spending and SWIFT are like the overturning of conventional public health policies on masking and lockdowns. We have entered the age of shitpost diplomacy, as coined by Tanner Green, in which the official Twitter account of the US Embassy in Kiev literally posts memes to spite Putin: A Russian sixth-grader could explain why celebrating the glories of Kievan Rus does not subvert Putin’s claims about the history of the Russian nation so much as reinforce them. Just like Hong Kong’s protests, Ukraine has won the meme war with utterly lopsided propaganda and unanimous international support on the Internet. As Yoshimi writes: Floating ghostlike above it is our war, the myth of the ‘Ghost of Kyiv’, ace MIG-29 pilot who has apparently shot down six Russian planes, or the legend of the Ukrainian soldiers defending an island outpost who replied “Russian warship go fuck yourselves” to a surrender offer and may or may not have died heroically, or two Russian II-76 transport aircraft that maybe were shot down near Kiev, or videos of air strikes or dead bodies which variously are Russian or Ukrainian until they turn out to be from Gaza six years ago, or the viral video of an old Ukrainian woman telling off a Russian soldier by offering him sunflower seeds so when he dies, sunflowers (Ukraine’s national flowers) will sprout from the soil. We’re raising funds for the Ukrainian army on crowdfunding apps and giving advice to the civilians being handed assault weapons about how to disable tanks, sharing weird homophobic pictures of Putin as a gay icon and spamming Russian government posts. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has made the decision to stay and fight rather than flee like most would-be leaders who go all in for American foreign policy, and now is being deified by us as “badass”, “a true leader”, etc. etc., alongside his people, whose resistance to authoritarianism we are told is unparalleled in the modern world. After all, so it goes, who could be next? And like in Hong Kong, despite winning the culture war in hyperreality, the actual war in reality is won by the side with overwhelming military might, not morality. The real war is where Ukrainians are experiencing the genuine life-shattering effects of military conflict. It matters because this is the first time Western response is driven by Twitter outcry, and it will not be the last. A New EA Cause? Besides Hanania’s recommendations in the last section (which he admits are more or less impossible in an excellent interview with Caplan), a worthy EA priority might be to somehow turn the public tide on sanctions, which literally kill more people than Putin. Americans should be appalled by the atrocity committed in their names. The banality of the incompetence of foreign policy elites does not excuse their evil. With how entrenched the special interests are, I have no idea if it’s even worth trying, but at the very least the sheer amount of suffering and death from sanctions should be made common knowledge. Nuclear security is one of the top priorities in Effective Altruism, per 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, and Our World In Data. Toby Orb, who wrote the definitive book on existential risk, The Precipice, estimates x-risk from nuclear war to be ~1 in 1000 in the next century. Luisa Rodriguez estimates a 1.1% chance of nuclear war each year and that the chances of a US-Russia nuclear war may be in the ballpark of 0.38% per year; summarised by Max Roser as: Nuclear risk is neglected by the public because of Pax Americana since the collapse of the USSR, and is not discussed as often in EA as it’s thought to be relatively well-funded and mainstream, but in fact major donors like the MacArthur Foundation have been withdrawing funding. As Joan Rohling details in an 80,000 Hours podcast there is much to be done, especially when Ukraine gave up their nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for Russia’s promise to never threaten or use military force against them. A worthwhile adjacent cause area might be de-escalation of public outcry to reduce x-risk from nuclear war beyond just regular anti-proliferation efforts — even a Russian specialist from the RAND Corporation is surprised by how much public outrage is driving policy: Even just the pace of the sanctions: we went to 11 out of 10 in like two days — farther than many expected we’d ever get in short order. And I think the same is true about these military assistance initiatives. We’re just trying to do something because there’s a public demand for action. So that’s what worries me, that the sort of public outrage that’s being channeled in Western democracies through political systems could result in decisions that prove ultimately unwise. Despite how odd it is that some wars are “legal” while others aren’t, we should be glad UNSC exists as much as everyone laughs at how useless the rest of the UN is. All is fair in love and war, but international norms is all that stands between us and nuclear annihilation. It is hard to emphasise just how delusional it is for the public to fixate on no-fly zones — I, like Scott, am surprised we’re still capable of jingoism. 80,000 Hours has updated their top career recommendations to include China specialist to improve China-Western coordination on global catastrophic risk, which seems more important after reading how irrational and captured the American foreign policy apparatus is. As Hanania writes, “great power competition” is an anachronism. If Ukraine is the first war warped by hyperreality, it won’t be the last. Now that US foreign policy elites have driven Putin into the arms of China, let’s hope IR specialists can imbibe the public choice model instead of antagonising yet another nuclear rival. Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is an important work because it raises the sanity waterline, which at the least should make us stop killing millions for no reason, and at the most should make the human race more knowledgeable of how to prevent total extinction from nuclear armageddon. Pax Americana is dead, but a multipolar world will be more humane. Endnotes In the fiscal year 2018, the top five government contractors were all weapons manufacturers, with Lockheed Martin in first place at $40.6 billion. The Department of Defence spent $358 billion on contracting, ten times higher than second place Department of Energy. Collective action problems that stop a bunch of smaller companies from effectively influencing policy are no hindrance for companies like Lockheed Martin.
Inline links: Gordon Tullock, cynical but probably accurate, Robin Hanson, The Myth of the Rational Voter, eye-opening, impressive, reviewed, predates, essay, writes, website, public outcry, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!R3g3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F693f0593-7460-4fb0-bc4a-e185cf6f0e06_964x506.png, not, viral lecture, NATO’s door remains open, we're going to start WW3 because you're in my sphere of influence, writes, writes, cancelled, banned, cancelled, writes,, German defence spending, shitpost diplomacy, posts, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!j4gR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3c5db00c-e420-4b54-b826-b85d9ddf186d_900x647.png, writes, interview, 80,000 Hours, Future of Life Institute, Our World In Data, The Precipice, ~1 in 1000, estimates, summarised, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!PRc2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe90b1bb5-d84b-45dc-b9fa-2edddbf6b9fa_1600x1006.png, Pax Americana, MacArthur Foundation, details, gave up, surprised, Scott, jingoism, China specialist, captured, writes, the sanity waterline, a multipolar world will be more humane
Highlights From The Comments On The Repugnant Conclusion And WWOTF
August 25, 2022 · Original source
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson had an interesting debate about this in 2008; you can read Eliezer here and Robin here. I think Robin later admitted that his view meant people in the past were much more valuable than people today, so much so that we should let an entire continent worth of present people die in order to prevent a caveman from stubbing his toe, and that he sort of kind of endorses this conclusion; see here.
Inline links: here, here, here
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October 18, 2022 · Original source
Robin Hanson, prediction markets pioneer
Inline links: Robin Hanson
Prediction Market FAQ
December 20, 2022 · Original source
- Any kind of experimentation that attacks the problems we are observing in practice with prediction markets, like working out how to make good multiple choice and numeric distribution market mechanisms, incentivizing accurate prices on long-term markets, and figuring out how to make markets user-friendly for people. We don't know how to do these things at Manifold and we are just a couple of people guessing and trying stuff out. More people advancing the state of the art on any of these subproblems would be extremely beneficial. Maybe the answer is that Robin Hanson and some other guys definitely worked it out in some papers somewhere, in which case, please come tell us about it.
More generally, studies usually find that prediction markets beat the average person, various experts, and various other methods like election polling. They are somewhere between equal-to and slightly-worse-than complicated aggregation algorithms, but these complicated aggregation algorithms are rarely used in real life, and I consider them to be “prediction markets lite”, ie part of the same toolbox of forecasting technologies. Hanson (2007) says (I have not individually checked each claim): Remarkably, in every known head-to-head field comparison between speculative markets and other forward-looking institutions, the speculative markets have been at least as accurate. More often than not, they prevail. Orange juice futures improve on National Weather Service forecasts (Roll 1984), horse race markets beat horse race experts (Figlewski 1979), Oscar markets beat columnist forecasts (Pennock, Giles, and Nielsen 2001), gas demand markets beat gas demand experts (Spencer 2004), stock markets beat the official NASA panel at identifying the company responsible for the Challenger accident (Maloney and Mulherin 2003), election markets beat national opinion polls (Berg, Nelson, and Rietz 2003), and corporate sales markets beat official corporate forecasts (Chen and Plott 2002). 2.4.1: If prediction markets are only as good as Nate Silver or other experts, who cares? Why don’t we just skip the prediction markets and listen to the experts directly? See the next section, “Why believe prediction markets are canonical?” 2.4.2: What if there are many equally impressive experts who disagree? What do prediction markets do then? See the next section, “Why believe prediction markets are canonical?” 3. Why believe prediction markets are canonical? By canonical, I mean that in ideal cases: all prediction markets speak with a single voice
Inline links: various experts, various other methods like election polling, complicated aggregation algorithms, Hanson (2007)
After the event happens, use the outcome to update everyone’s reputation and refine the algorithm. Superforecasting uses some of the same ideas as prediction markets - probabilistic forecasts, incentives to get the right answer, aggregation methods that favor people with good track records. In studies comparing superforecasting tournaments to small prediction markets, the superforecasting tournaments have done equally well or even slightly better. My goal with this FAQ is not to claim that prediction markets are always better than superforecasting. I think of both as part of the same revolution in forecasting technology, and would be happy with policy-makers or other important people using either. Still, I do think that each has situations where they might be a better fit than the other. Superforecasting tournaments shine on questions so far in the future that financial incentives start to lose force (for example, people are unlikely to place bets on questions about 2100, when most of them will be dead anyway). They’re also good in situations where you can’t get a big prediction market together - superforecasting scales down more gracefully, since you can identify individuals as superforecasters and consult them even in situations where you can’t get a full tournament together. Prediction markets shine in avoiding advanced manipulation attempts, in providing a single canonical answer when someone might worry that any given tournament was biased, and in aggregating the results of superforecaster tournaments with each other and with other sources. Remember that a superforecasting tournament can be considered an “expert”, like Nate Silver. So by the argument in Part 2, we should expect that a big prediction market won’t consistently be worse than any given superforecasting tournament, as long as the tournament’s answers are public knowledge. If there were ever a superforecasting tournament that consistently outperformed prediction markets, that would be a simple mispricing, people would correct it, and the market would eventually agree with the tournament. 4.5: Aren’t prediction markets gambling? Isn’t gambling bad and addictive? Yes, sort of. But most countries allow forms of gambling that aren’t too addictive and have some social value. For example, investing in stocks, or investing in commodities futures. I think prediction markets are more like this than like traditional gambling in casinos. People who want to gamble can already buy cryptocurrencies, or trade stocks on Robin Hood, or (in 20 states) place online sports bets on sites like DraftKings. All these things seem more addictive than, and have less social utility than, prediction markets. I don’t think promoting or legalizing prediction markets is going to make the gambling situation much worse than it is already - so given how useful I think they are, I think they would be net positive. People who are more concerned about the gambling aspect might want to stick to play money prediction markets, which wouldn’t have this problem. 4.6: Where does the money in prediction markets come from? That is, if "you get a dollar when the Democrats win”, who provides the dollar? In the abstract, prediction markets pair up people who want to bet on different sides of a proposition. For example, if a market says that there’s a 75% chance that the Democrats win, then they pair up someone willing to buy a share in “The Democrats win” for $0.75 with someone willing to buy a share in “The Democrats lose” for $0.25, for a total of $1 spent on these two shares. Then, when the Democrats either win or lose, the person with the correct share gets the $1. In practice it’s annoying to have to wait for someone to take the opposite side of the trade, so some people (or bots!) play “market maker” and are willing to take your bet on the assumption that someone else will come along soon to take the other side. But it’s usually safe to abstract this step away and just imagine people betting with each other, using the market as an intermediary. 4.6.1: Then why should anyone play prediction markets, when on average they’ll only break even? It seems like this is a worse deal than stocks, which tend to go up over time. Every dollar someone wins on a prediction market corresponds to someone else’s loss; in expectation; across all participants, the average gain is 0. But the stock market tends to go up over time, as businesses expand to new areas and invent new products; across all participants, the average gain is about 4% per year. So why ever invest in prediction markets instead of stocks? Whatever the theoretical answer to this question, lots of people do invest in prediction markets instead of stocks sometimes; several existing prediction markets have questions with hundreds of thousands of dollars in trading volume. You would have to ask those people why they do it. Maybe it’s because it’s fun. Or maybe it’s because they think (rightly or wrongly) that they’re above average and can make a profit. This is no different than other zero-sum games like sports betting, which attracts billions of dollars each year. The futures and commodities markets are also zero-sum, but attract billions of dollars by giving companies an opportunity to hedge risk. For example, a nickel mine might get rich if the price of nickel goes up, but go bankrupt if the price of nickel goes down. And they might prefer a predictable world where they get a small but guaranteed profit no matter what happens to nickel prices. So they bet some amount of money on commodity markets that the price of nickel will go down, and then their income is the sum of what they make from their nickel mining and from their bets - which, if they handled their hedging correctly, should be a small but guaranteed profit. Prediction markets would allow hedging of other types of risk - for example, import-export businesses might want to hedge against the risk that a protectionist politician gets elected, or tourism companies might want to hedge against a pandemic that closes international borders. These people would inject enough money into the market to subsidize sophisticated speculators. Finally, I envision that someday people who want to know the answer to specific questions can subsidize prediction markets on them. For example, the Democratic Party might subsidize a conditional market (see 5.1) about which Democratic primary candidate is most likely to win the general election. Their money would go to giving the average investor a 4% (or some other number) rate of return - although of course winners would gain more than that and losers would still lose on net. I think this is the most likely way for prediction markets to become very big. 4.6.1.1: If people use prediction markets to hedge risk, won’t that distort them? That is, suppose that an import-export business spends millions of dollars betting that Trump will win in order to hedge against his protectionist policies. Since their bets aren’t based on the real chance of Trump winning, won’t that distort the market? No. Suppose that everyone knows Trump has a 50-50 chance of winning. And suppose the import-export business, in the process of hedging risk, bids it up to 90-10. Since you know Trump has a 50-50 chance of winning, you can get rich quick by bidding it back down to 50-50. From your point of view, the import-export business is (in expectation) giving you free money. But they’re still happy to do it, because they’re hedging their risk successfully. 4.7: Aren’t a lot of the questions we care about inherently subjective or hard to measure? This is a frequent problem for prediction markets. For example, we might want to know something like “will we get human-level AI before 2050?” But how do we define “human-level AI”? If there’s an AI that’s much better than humans at most tasks, but much worse at a few, is that “human-level”? If there’s an AI that seems human-level in demos, but the team that makes it won’t let it be independently tested, should that count? If it works through some kind of Frankenstein chip that combines vat-grown brain tissue with computing machinery, is that still an “AI”? Prediction markets have found a few ways around this problem. First, many groups (for example, Metaculus) try to define their resolution criteria very carefully. A typical Metaculus question on AI sounds like this: We will thus define "an AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans. Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can send text, images, and audio files (as is done in ordinary text messaging applications) during the course of their conversation. An 'adversarial' Turing test is one in which the human judges are instructed to ask interesting and difficult questions, designed to advantage human participants, and to successfully unmask the computer as an impostor. A single demonstration of an AI passing such a Turing test, or one that is sufficiently similar, will be sufficient for this condition, so long as the test is well-designed to the estimation of Metaculus Admins.
Links For February 2023
February 09, 2023 · Original source
36: Robin Hanson: Why Is Everyone So Boring? I basically agree with his conclusion: it’s too easy and profitable to attack people socially, for most people do anything except crouch in a maximally defensive posture.
Inline links: Why Is Everyone So Boring?
Against Ice Age Civilizations
March 03, 2023 · Original source
There’s a good debate about this on the subreddit; see also Robin Hanson and Samo Burja.
Inline links: on the subreddit, Robin Hanson, Samo Burja
Links For March 2023
March 10, 2023 · Original source
17: Public Intellectuals For Charity wants me to advertise their Dystopian Fact Checks series, where various public intellectuals including Steven Pinker, Robin Hanson, Robert Sapolsky, Coleman Hughes, etc will debate each other on Zoom to raise money for charity. See here for details.
Inline links: See here for details
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
CAMBRIDGE, UK Contact: Hamish Todd Contact Info: hamish[dot]todd1[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, May 20th, 02:00 PM Location: Upstairs at The Bath House pub! Where it also is on the third Saturday of every month :) Email me if you'd like to be notified of further events. I usually have copies of Robin Hanson and Peter Singer books on the table. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F426439+J9 Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/EaLB8WwzPpABp2nbg/cambridge-acx-ssc-monthly-meetup
Inline links: https://plus.codes/9F426439+J9, https://www.lesswrong.com/events/EaLB8WwzPpABp2nbg/cambridge-acx-ssc-monthly-meetup
Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market
June 06, 2023 · Original source
This is the same question I ask about George Mason. Many people have remarked on how impressive it is that they have Tyler Cowen, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Garett Jones, etc, despite not being the sort of Ivy League school where you would expect famous people to congregate. The answer has to be that the department is selecting for Devereaux-like people with popular fame rather than academic fame. What tradeoffs are they making here, and have they paid off?
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
WASHINGTON, DC, USA Contact: John Bennett Contact Info: WashingtonDCAstralCodexTen[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, September 9th, 6:00 PM Location: Froggy Bottom Pub, 2021 K St NW, Washington, DC 20006 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J Group Link: Uptown: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, Downtown https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/ and https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx. Notable Guests: Robin Hanson, notable economist Notes: We've rented out the Froggy Bottom Pub for the night, dinner and soft drinks will be provided. Alcohol available for purchase if desired, but no purchases are required. There is metered street parking on nearby blocks; the closest Metro stations are Farragut West and Farragut North.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87C4WX33+3J, https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/, https://www.facebook.com/groups/605023464809227, https://www.facebook.com/groups/433668130485595/, https://groups.google.com/g/dc-acx
Open Thread 293
September 11, 2023 · Original source
2: Manifold Markets wants me to remind you that this is approximately your last chance to sign up for Manifest, their forecasting and prediction market conference in Berkeley, CA. Guests will include Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, Aella, Zvi, and the CEOs of Kalshi, Manifold, and Polymarket. I’m still figuring out if I can make it but I’ll try my best.
Inline links: Manifest, their forecasting and prediction market conference
Impact Market Mini-Grants Results
October 09, 2023 · Original source
Tyler Cowen likes to say that grants are as much about investing in people as in projects, so I also wanted to compliment the founders: Jingyi, Saul, and Tom, from (respectively) Brandeis, Brandeis, and Harvard. Saul has since gone on to be the lead organizer for Manifest, a forecasting conference with 200+ attendees and talks by Nate Silver, Robin Hanson, and many more. Jingyi is an officer of Brandeis Effective Altruism. And I remember Tom as being a top performer in the 22-and-under age bracket in last year’s Prediction Contest. Good luck to all of them in their remaining college and future endeavors.
Inline links: Prediction Contest
23
October 31, 2023 · Original source
Robin Hanson compares this to steam engines. People had steam engines since ancient Greece, but they didn’t catch on until the Industrial Revolution. And part of this is that you can’t just open a stall in the bazaar saying “Steam engines for sale! Get your steam engines!” You need to figure out a specific niche for which the steam engines of your day are economically efficient, become really familiar with that niche, build a steam engine specifically suited to it, and then work with your clients to turn it into a packaged, easy to buy, easy to use solution. For real steam engines, that first niche was pumping water out of coal mines. For prediction markets, it’s . . . what?
Hanson is less sure about this answer than the overall story, but he suggests hiring. You could create some kind of product that companies could buy and give their hiring managers at the beginning of a hiring round, asking them to predict which candidates would get good employee evaluation results or promotions at the end of X amount of time. Even if you’re Manifold or Metaculus or someone who already has a good prediction engine, making this product requires a lot of adaptations. Who should be part of the market? What training should you give them beforehand? What should the resolution criteria be? Hanson thinks that the process of designing this product, answering customer questions about it, and iterating before you sell to the next customer is the kind of last-mile problem whose solution will make prediction markets ready for the big time.
Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
April 24, 2024 · Original source
Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias more or less believes medicine doesn’t work [EDIT: see his response here, where he says this is an inaccurate summary of his position. Further chain of responses here and here]
Inline links: Overcoming Bias, here,, here, here
This is a strong claim. It would be easy to round Hanson’s position off to something weaker, like “extra health care isn’t valuable on the margin”. This is how most people interpret the studies he cites. Still, I think his current, actual position is that medicine doesn’t work. For example, he writes:
Inline links: he writes
Or, even more clearly:
Inline links: even more clearly
Open Thread 327
April 28, 2024 · Original source
6: Robin Hanson wrote a response to my piece arguing against his healthcare views. I’ll probably have a response up sometime in the next week or two if I don’t get distracted.
Inline links: wrote a response
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:
Open Thread 328
May 06, 2024 · Original source
2: Robin Hanson and Richard Hanania have both responded to my posts on their work; I’ll probably have Highlights From The Comments threads where I discuss their responses further at some point.
Inline links: Robin Hanson, Richard Hanania
Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism
September 10, 2024 · Original source
Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be.
Robin Hanson cashes out “the singularity” as an economic phase change of equal magnitude to the Agricultural or Industrial Revolutions. If we stick to that definition, we can do a little better at predicting it: it’s a change of a size such that it’s happened twice before. Using our previous number, we estimate ~30% chance that such a change happens in our lifetime.
On Priesthoods
January 08, 2025 · Original source
Society-wide: The marketplace of ideas! This is where everyone gets to have their say. New hypotheses get stress-tested, bounced off against each other, and only the strongest survive. This level also produces true learning - if only one idea survives the marketplace, then average spectators can easily pick it out (although of course it can still be wrong). Its disadvantage is that it’s impossible for several billion people to hold a true “discussion” among themselves. Also, many of these people are extremely stupid, their ideas are bad, and they fill the conversation with noise. Is there a useful group size in between these two? What about discussing ideas in a group made of only the most intelligent and knowledgeable people? This gives you the debate and collaboration functions that you only get in group conversation. But it’ll have a better signal-to-noise ratio than all of society, and it might be small enough to manage. Also, you can make people sign on to good discussion norms before they enter, and you can expel them if they screw up. The Boundary Against The Public From this formulation, it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public. The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals. I recently reviewed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus To Our House, on the architectural priesthood. It discusses the response when renegade architects would build things in styles favored by the public - for example, Edward Stone and the Kennedy Center: Stone and Saarinen, like Frank Lloyd Wright and Goff and Greene, were too American, which meant both too parochial (not part of the International Style) and too bourgeois. Somehow they actually catered to the hog-stomping Baroque exuberance of American civilization. When Stone designed the Kennedy Center in Washington with a lobby six stories high and six hundred and thirty feet long – so big, as one journalist pointed out, that Mickey Mantle’s mightiest home run would have been just another long fly ball – it was regarded as an obscenity. Stone was actually playing upto American megolomania. He was encouraging the barbaric yawps. He was glorifying The Client’s own grandiose sentiments. More generally: In a way, the very productivity of a man like Wright, Portman, or Stone counted against him, given the new mental atmosphere at the universities. Oh, it was easy enough, one supposed, to go out into the marketplace and wheedle and vamp and dance for clients and get buildings to do. But the brave soul was he who remained within the compound, stayed within the university orbit. Or, from the comments, this quote by architect Peter Eisenman: What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!). Granted that some of this is because I lean libertarian and so do they - but I don’t think there’s a mountain of amazing and popular left-wing econbloggers who I’m ignoring. Part of this must be that Mercatus head Tyler Cowen is better at spotting and cultivating talent than others - but you’d still think the #73 ranked department would try to poach some of his hard work. When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. This is my experience too. I once got rejected from a psychiatry residency I wanted, partly because they saw I had a blog and thought it might cause trouble (though the less prestigious hospital that eventually accepted me did consider it a plus, for which I remain grateful). I wish I could say that the program which rejected me is kicking themselves right now - I’m probably one of the most-read psychiatrists in the world, and most of what I write is relatively orthodox and (I hope) reflects well on the field. But outside of my fantasies, they are doing nothing of the sort. At best, my blog has gone from a liability to being neutral or a very slight positive. Certainly it doesn’t make me as impressive as someone who went to a medical school one tier above mine. Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. Still, at least I’m a member in good standing. At least I’m higher than pond scum. The lowest-status doctor in the world - the guy who, if doctors were Maoist revolutionaries, would get his face on the “Criticize X, Criticize Y” posters - is Dr. Oz. This isn’t because Dr. Oz lacks medical skill. Back in the day, he was a professor of surgery at Columbia, and by all accounts quite good at it. But then he went on TV and started catering to the public. He told them their stupid miracle cures and $19.99 supplements were Real Medicine. Imagine a Catholic bishop declaring ex cathedra that The Da Vinci Code is 100% real. Authority bestowed to fight the heresies of a fallen world, instead used to prop up those heresies. Columbia recently “cut ties” with Oz in some vague way, but as far as the medical profession is concerned, it’s too little, too late. I think the profession’s hatred for Oz is justified - his claims are false and probably cause a lot of harm. But other doctors who say false harmful things get only a fraction of the hatred that Dr. Oz does. He’s not just defrauding and maybe killing the people who take his supplements. He’s sullying Medicine itself. This hard boundary - this contempt for two-way traffic with the public - might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function. The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed - that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly. Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations. The Boundary Against Capitalism Dr. Oz illustrates another point: power corrupts, and the priests (as people known to be more knowledgeable than the public) have the power to bless or damn interventions in their field. Without some boundary against capitalism, they would abuse that power to make money. Again, cultural evolution has produced such a boundary. A doctor who seems too mercenary loses status in the priesthood. My father - a much more orthodox (and hence higher-status) member of the medical priesthood than I will ever be - used to even get suspicious of concierge doctors. Was it really in keeping with the principles of medicine to care about the amount of money you got for your service? Shouldn’t the usual insurance payments (calculated behind the scenes, without you ever having to think about it) be enough for anybody? If you let doctors charge extra for their services, they might do bad medicine in order to increase profits. In the worst case scenario, they might flatter members of the public who wanted all-natural $19.99 supplements. This taboo has faded as insurance squeezes doctors harder; even my father eventually relented. But there’s still the sense that doctor is a calling in a way that used-car salesman isn’t. If you pursue money too aggressively, can we really be sure you’ve heard the call? Why doesn’t every doctor pursue their own $19.99 supplement business? Some of this is professional regulation - there’s a sense that probably the Medical Board will come down on you if you do something wrong (though most doctors are proudly ignorant of the exact limits of the Medical Board’s power - why should the pious worry about the exact boundaries of excommunicable offenses?) But most of the barrier comes from self-regulation based on social status. By the time you’re done with medical school and residency, all of your non-doctor friends have long since abandoned you, and all the old sources of status and approval that you used to crave have been excised and replaced with the all-seeing eye of the medical priesthood. If you sell out and start the supplement line, you might get a new Ferrari, but everyone whose opinion you respect will hold you in contempt. The public might think it’s cool that you have a Ferrari, but doctors know better: nobody with a supplement line has ever been cool. This doesn’t mean doctors are incorruptible. Plenty of them become pharma company shills. But that’s because being a pharma company shill doesn’t burn intra-priesthood respect the same way. For better or worse, pharma companies straddle the priesthood boundary. They may not be fellow priests, but they’re at least nuns or deacons or something. They won this by sacrificing certain capitalist parts of themselves (for example, becoming heavily regulated) and by agreeing to follow the norms of the medical priesthood (for example, communicating through papers published in medical journals with high-status doctors as lead authors). Through their sacrifice, they achieve ritual purity; now priests can interact with them guilt-free. Is ritual purity really the same as moral acceptability? Sounds like the kind of question a member of the public might ask! Communication Norms Within The Priesthoods Although priests talk normally when when they meet one another at the water cooler, ex cathedra communication must be performed in a ritually pure way. For the medical priesthood, that means papers published in a medical journal. Consider ritually impure communication - for example, Twitter. Someone may try to make a medical claim (“SSRIs are a great depression treatment!”). But one can’t even predict the genre the reply will take. It could be any of: Insult (“You’re just another a big pharma shill trying to poison us!”)
Inline links: recently reviewed, is only the 74th best, recently “cut ties” with Oz, too little, too late
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
The original goal of OpenAI was to ensure that the singularity created broad-based prosperity for everyone, maybe through a basic income. Whether or not a charity holds 51% (or some other number) of OpenAI shares is relevant to this vision. If OpenAI initiates a singularity and ends up with all the money in the world, then maybe 49% of all the money in the world goes to their investors (creating a caste of mega-plutocrats), but 51% goes to a nonprofit charged with benefiting all humanity (and this is where the basic income comes from?). I do think it’s kind of unlikely that OpenAI ends up creating God yet also remains subject to the Attorney General of California. But it’s not totally impossible - Robin Hanson has written a lot about how if there are many competing near-peer superintelligences and companies, they might choose to keep existing property and governance structures as referees. In this one unlikely scenario, the exact percent of OpenAI shares held by investors vs. charity might matter a lot.
Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party
July 21, 2025 · Original source
“It’s fine,” you say, patting him on the shoulder. “Didn’t someone say Robin Hanson was going to be here? He’s always fun to talk to.”
“Nah, I screwed up and invited Robin Hanson and Rob Henderson to the same party. It went pretty much how you’d expect. Hanson told Henderson he only talked about luxury beliefs as a virtue signal, Henderson told Hanson he only believed in virtue signals as a luxury belief, and they kept going back and forth until both of them collapsed of dehydration. I called the paramedics, but they’d all quit to do AI research at Meta. So I dragged Rob and Robin into the bathroom. As far as I know they’re still out cold.”
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Well, the team did manage one accomplishment during these years: in 1990, Robin Hanson showed up and ran the first ever corporate prediction market at Xanadu. Its employees assigned a 7% probability to verification of the cold fusion experiment in the next year, and a 70% probability to releasing Xanadu before Deng Xiaoping died. Cold fusion was debunked, and Deng died long before any version of Xanadu would be released. Bonus trivia: this story from Robin Hanson is how I first learned of Xanadu’s existence!
Inline links: ran the first ever corporate prediction market, cold fusion experiment
It’s extremely hard to like Ted Nelson once you’ve read his autobiography. For instance, in the space of just two pages, he writes about how incredibly virtuous he is for not selling out to Bill Gates, that “friends often tell [him], ‘Oh, you should get a MacArthur Genius Grant!’,” and that Robin Williams once “squatted down beside” him and said: “I think it’s wonderful what you’ve done for the world.”
Of course, Nelson deserves plenty of blame too. In many ways, he really was a nutjob, and he certainly wasn’t capable of building Xanadu on his own—still, the concept itself was solid! If Nelson hadn’t turned down Vannevar Bush and Bill Gates and Robin Williams and the half-dozen other famous people he claims were kissing his ass at one point or another, maybe someone sometime could’ve figured out how to build it for him. But he couldn’t do it. Nelson was too busy play-acting as a great, tortured, persecuted genius. By the time he’d become pacified enough to let Autodesk help him build Xanadu, he was too pacified to exercise any sort of authority or discipline over his project anymore. He just went to his sex parties and watched it all burn.
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
(2) has always been the idealistic hope of people like Robin Hanson. However, info buying has a public goods problem: you pay for the info, but everyone in the world gets it, including those who don't pay. There are limited cases where it makes sense for one org to pay (esp. decision markets), but even there, it seems likely that the market volumes achieved with that strategy will not be too high.