Interview
#25 - Prof Robin Hanson on why we have to lie to ourselves about why we do what we do
- Rob Wiblin anticipates that the interview with Robin Hanson will be entertaining yet distinctive and potentially polarizing for most 80,000 Hours podcast subscribers.
- Rob Wiblin predicts continued enjoyment of the EconTalk podcast nine years after beginning to listen, estimating the archives contain approximately 600 hours of episodes equivalent to 25 days of non-stop listening.
- Robin Hanson plans to investigate puzzles in education and medicine by identifying empirical patterns that contradict standard narratives and proposing alternative motives to explain them.
- Robin Hanson expects the conscious mind to function primarily as a press secretary that constantly rummages for plausible high-minded stories to justify behavior and avoid accusations of norm violations.
- Robin Hanson predicts that due to the non-modular nature of the brain, it is evolutionarily more efficient for individuals to sincerely believe their own high-minded stories rather than consciously lie about hidden selfish motives.
- Robin Hanson foresees that humans will likely over-spend on medicine and education because the standard narrative of direct benefit is less motivating than the hidden motive of signaling care and status to the community.
- Robin Hanson expects that most people will ignore information regarding the quality of medicine or education unless they are policy analysts or managers for whom understanding the truth is a job requirement.
- Robin Hanson predicts that effective altruism currently functions partly as a youth movement where young people form social bonds and identities to gain influence and senior roles decades later, rather than achieving immediate large-scale impact.
- Robin Hanson suggests that effective giving is skewed toward youth because people donate and volunteer when young to demonstrate empathy and form relationships, even though resources and knowledge for effective giving peak later in life.
- Robin Hanson predicts that "marginal charity" involving small behavioral adjustments is neglected because it is difficult to display such changes to others for social signaling purposes.
- Robin Hanson expects that money invested for charity decades or centuries in the future could grow to be a thousand times larger using a 5% annual compound interest rate, making it more effective than immediate giving despite agency costs.
- Robin Hanson predicts that people will ignore effective altruism data due to the social risk of appearing "holier than thou," which causes peers to reject the advice rather than adopt it.
- Robin Hanson expects that individuals will eventually be punished in public goods settings for giving more than the average, as such behavior is interpreted as an attempt to make others feel inferior.
- Robin Hanson predicts that the "sincere nerd" strategy is adopted by those with lower social savviness who lack the ability to successfully conceal low motives while appearing high-minded.
- Robin Hanson expects that the direct actions of early-stage youth movements will be largely ineffective, with their primary benefit being the creation of social bonds and future influence.
- Robin Hanson predicts that policy reforms will fail if they attempt to provide people with more of what they pretend to want, rather than allowing them to maintain their pretenses while actually obtaining what they really want.
- Robin Hanson expects organizations to resist prediction markets because these tools threaten the political strategies and excuses managers rely on when projects fail.
- Robin Hanson predicts that prediction markets will only become standard practice if they reach ubiquity similar to cost accounting, requiring a shift from viewing them as accusations of "bullshit" to normal operational tools.
- Robin Hanson expects most policy reforms to be rejected because they challenge the "sacred" nature of fields like medicine, education, and religion where defenders are unwilling to accept that primary motives differ from public claims.
- Robin Hanson predicts that futurism will benefit from applying standard social science tools to concrete technology scenarios rather than relying on high-tech speculation or abstract value judgments without factual grounding.
- Robin Hanson expects that "Far Mode" thinking causes people to view future societies as more uniform and morally rigid, leading to overconfidence in theories and intolerance of variation.
- Robin Hanson predicts that discussions on distant issues like AI risk or global warming focus on values rather than facts because people lack concrete data and default to personal preferences.
- Robin Hanson expects that authors writing first books in their fields tend to be more controversial and contrarian to gain attention, while established figures can rely on authority to confirm existing expectations with data.
- Robin Hanson predicts the need to find concrete ways to test and implement institutional ideas like Futarki through field experiments, as academic papers alone are insufficient for changing real-world organizations.
- Robin Hanson expects the effective altruism community to focus more on collecting and sharing key new insights rather than repeating existing knowledge or relying on good intentions.
- Robin Hanson predicts the trend toward larger organizations and global coordination will continue despite futurist hopes for small, agile startups, because large organizations possess inherent advantages in innovation and efficiency.
- Robin Hanson expects people to generally avoid specific data on medical or educational effectiveness to protect their ability to maintain social signals of care and morality.