Review
This is a linkpost for https://overcoming-bias-anthology.com/
Review
Overcoming Bias Anthology
14George Ingebretsen
10Fabien Roger
10Nutrition Capsule
3jmh
1Nutrition Capsule
1cdt
11Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
3Nutrition Capsule
7kave
6[anonymous]
4Yoav Ravid
2Arjun Panickssery
3xpym
7Arjun Panickssery
New Comment
How difficult would it be to turn this into an epub or pdf? Is there word of that coming soon? (or integrating into LW like the Codex?)
2I have converted the anthology into an audio format using the default (and terrible) AWS AI voice (mostly for my own consumption): https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fabien368/episodes/Overcoming-bias-anthology---our-thinking-e2q61mg
Very good! Hoping to see - weakly intending to commit - a post list of his latest boom (fertility decline, which lead him to culture). I attended one of Robin's Zoom meetings on culture, and I'm confident it is on par with his other great fixations thus far (prediction markets, signaling, ems and aliens) if not even bigger. Robin seems absolutely possessed by the phenomenon.
For those who do not follow him: Robin has begun seeing culture as broken/maladaptive, and he seems to think this is perhaps the key issue of our time, on par or bigger than climate change and AI. He thinks that cultural change is driven into directions which will eventually lead to population decline and nasty places, even though he remains optimistic on our species' future in the long run.
Could you clarify a bit here. Is Hanson talking about specific cultures or all of the instances of culture?
Hanson seems to treat the global civilization as a cultural melting pot, but he does distinguish insular subcultures from that. I intuit he sees contemporary cultures on a gradient relative to global, hegemonic trends (which correlate with technological progress, increasing wealth and education) and thereby drifting pressures.
This is not novel to Hanson, it's been a staple of (neo)reactionary /conservative thought for millenia.
I wouldn't equate Robin's perspectives on culture with reactionary movements or conservatism. If anything, he seems quite open to radical transformations of society (e.g. futarchy to replace parlamentarism, bounty systems and vouching to replace policing, private insurance policies to replace welfare policies etc.).
Whereas (neo-)reactionary / conservative thought simply often intends to return some previous status quo, Robin does not confess to representing such views and has not proposed such solutions. In fact, as far as I'm aware he hasn't proposed any solutions at all as of yet.
EDIT: (Mis-)interpreted your comment as Robin pushing (neo-)reactionary ideas. I do agree that conservative and reactionary movements generally show interest towards cultural drift as a phenomenon. However, if you propose that Robin's ideas themselves are not novel, I'd like to hear which ideas in particular you think have already been tackled for millenia or some other timescale.
1
1Robin Hanson is one of the intellectual fathers of LessWrong, and I'm very glad there's a curated, organised list of some of his main themes.
He's the first thinker I remember reading and thinking "what? that's completely wrong", who went on to have a big influence on my thought. Apparently I'm not an isolated case (paragraph 3 page 94).
Thanks, Arjun and Richard.
I notice that there's just shy of 128 here and they're mostly pretty short, so you can start the day by flipping a coin 7 times to decide which one to read. Not a bisection search, just convert the seven flips to binary and pick the corresponding number. At first, you only have to start over and do another 7 flips if you land on 1111110 (126), 1111111 (127), or 0000000 (128).
If you drink coffee in the morning, this is a way better way to start the day than social media, as the early phase of the stimulant effect reinforces behavior in most people. Hanson's approach to various topics is a good mentality to try boosting this way.
Yeah it's for the bounty. Hanson suggested that a list of links might be preferred to a printed book, at least for now, since he might want to edit the posts.
Curated and popular this week