Modern Meditations: Robin Hanson

Which current or historical figure has most impacted your thinking?

I was not especially influenced by a deep reading of any particular historical figure. I was mostly influenced by the aura or reputation of certain individuals – the story people told about them.

In particular, I was drawn to people that saw the world differently and as a result of that, had big insights that created a lot of progress. Those were the sorts of heroes I admired and wanted to copy: people like Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Hugh Everett, even Sigmund Freud.

When I studied physics in college, most of the primary topics were taught with respect to the heroic physicists responsible for them. I wanted to be one of those people – someone credited with a powerful insight that gets named and taught to everybody because it’s so useful.

What craft are you spending a lifetime honing?

Figuring out stuff that's important. There's a world of stuff out there that could be worth understanding, and some of it is just much more important than others.

There are just a lot of different tricks for figuring stuff out. Over the decades, I've accumulated more ways to figure things out, more tools I can use, and developed better judgment on what’s important. As a result, I’ve chosen not to collect more prestige markers, amass influential positions and connections, or win fans who will love me. Those are things other people in my field often try to do. I’ve just honed in on figuring things out. I think I’m good at it.

Some people seem to think it’s hard to figure out what’s important. I don’t agree. It seems to me that we share very basic metrics about what’s most important in the world: how many people it affects, how much it affects them, whether people care about it or not, and whether there’s an opportunity to influence rather than just observe. These are pretty obvious metrics that I don’t feel the need to deviate much from. It doesn’t have to be especially subtle.

I don’t think people would disagree with my judgments about what’s important – more so whether it’s possible to make progress on them. People usually have a bunch of assumptions about different topics. I like to question those and see where we know less than we think we do.

Take the topic of aliens, for example. I think almost everybody would agree that if there are aliens, that would be pretty important, right? They’re just not sure if they exist, so they think there’s nothing to say about them. But, no, I think there are some things I can say about them.

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What do you consider your most important insight?

We should all expect to be biased towards whatever has been on our mind lately…But I do happen to think the two things I’ve been into lately are the most important!

The first is about governance mechanisms. It may be the most important choice we make. Currently, we make many important collective choices through various institutions. But if we could actually find a better institution through which we can make collective choices, that just seems overwhelmingly important because then we’d do better on everything else.

I am the inventor of what I think is a substantially better institution: futarchy.

Futarchy is a concept I introduced beginning 25 years ago. It suggests using prediction markets to drive policy decisions and governance. With futarchy, democratic processes are used to define what we want, while markets are used to speculate on which policies we expect to best meet those ends. If a prediction market clearly shows a policy will increase national welfare, it becomes a law.

Over the last few years, different organizations have begun to trial this model, and I’ve been helping them. For example, a secretive India-based health agency has been running experiments for about a year and a half, and a crypto organization called MetaDAO has been operating this way. There are also a couple of startups that I’m advising that are trying to enter the space.

I think it’s my best idea and, obviously, objectively important. If you don’t think futarchy will work or that it can’t be adopted, then you might not agree, but if you grant me those, I think it’s clearly my most important insight.

The second is my analysis of “cultural drift.” In brief, humanity’s superpower is culture. It’s driven by natural selection, where the most adaptive cultures grow and thrive. For that to happen, you need enough variation and strong enough selection and relatively low rates of internal drift – solidity within the culture. I think it’s plausible to say that humans are naturally lazy and selfish and tend to ignore the future. It was our culture that made us attend to those things, and cultural selection favored those who worked instead of playing and paid attention to the future.

In the 1700s, we had hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures with poverty, war, and famine. These cultures had high selection and low drift – they were competing externally more than internally. Fundamentally, they were more conservative in their outlook.

Over the last few centuries, this model has changed. We moved from peasant cultures to nation-states to a single-world monoculture. It’s low variety; there are fewer selection pressures because we’re rich and comfortable, and there are high rates of drift because we celebrate people who cause cultural change. The result is a culture that isn’t directed by selection pressures – it’s random or maladaptive. Low fertility is a pretty obvious example of a maladaptive shift.

The ancient Greeks and Romans experienced this same decline. They had a big boom in population and wealth, followed by a fall in fertility and the decay of their civilization.

It’s hard to find solutions to cultural drift. But futarchy is one of the more prominent approaches. The two most important things I’ve worked on intersect and support each other.

What piece of art can you not stop thinking about?

The art that most moves me is music. I am often arrested in my tracks by a piece of music that I know I like. But even hearing it again amazes and moves me. Artists like Enya, Vangelis and Julianna Barwick come to mind.

Different genres of music draw from different emotional palettes, in my view. A piece of music is compelling when it conveys a particular emotion especially well. I think we tend to like genres that draw from the emotions each of us most cherish. For example, Vangelis’s music is majestic, triumphal, or exploratory, while Barwick’s is more worshipful, like a church service.

I spent the past year studying culture. People’s reaction to music – and other pieces of art – is something my usual social science theories struggle to explain. There’s a substantial residual puzzle to be understood.

Pieces of art are surprisingly potent in creating and cementing allegiance to particular cultural values. For example, as a child, you might be taught to value exploration. When you see a movie or hear a song that sincerely, authentically, and impressively embodies that emotion, I think it makes you more secure in embracing it as a value. This mechanism is one of the reasons I think culture is more powerful than it often seems.

What tradition or practice from another culture or era do you think we should widely adopt?

We’ve told ourselves a little too confidently that everything that came before us is irrelevant. Any practices that were widespread across many cultures throughout history, we should probably be more considerate of than we have been.

I'm most struck by how much pre-literate ancient cultures spent on massive monuments. In some cases it was up to a quarter of GDP! The Egyptians or Mayans or Chinese all went wild building enormous structures; it was apparently very motivating to them. They relied on volunteers more than slave labor. Seemingly, these projects unified them and created a common purpose.

It makes me wonder if it would be possible to get a big fraction of our world behind some grand project, like getting to another star system. I think we could come up with a better idea than putting together a big pile of stones, although we’ve lost the habit of undertaking enormous projects. Even the space race in the US – which is a go-to example – didn't take more than 1% of US income at the time.

You’d need a reliable governance mechanism to orchestrate the project and allocate the capital. We did succeed in getting to the Moon with our current governance mechanism, but I fear that our current government isn’t up to the task.

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If you had unlimited resources and no operational constraints, what experiment would you run?

This is very much related to the above, but recently, I’ve become interested in exploring what a galvanizing, collective project might look like.

I've done two sets of polls on Twitter asking about 32 options on each, but I'd like to see what a larger representative sample of the world would say. My followers are apparently really into space, and they think space projects are what would get the world motivated.

There are a few different themes you could envision.

For starters, you could focus on concrete, physical accomplishments like having more people living in space, reaching another star, or terraforming Mars. You can imagine people getting behind that in the same way people got behind the space race in the 1960s. Another type of accomplishment would be achieving immortality or reaching very long lifespans. That’s another concrete achievement that could inspire people. Then, there are things academics often recommend, like reducing suffering, improving equality, and increasing wealth. In my polls, those didn’t get as much support, maybe because they’re more abstract.

If you want to get the world behind a sacred quest that people are willing to make sacrifices for, I think it will have to be relatively concrete.

What is the most significant thing you've changed your mind about over the past decade?

In the past decade, I changed my mind on three, maybe four, major topics. Probably more in fact.

One that I learned the hard way is that people are really sensitive about gender-related topics. At rare points in my life, I’ve commented on these issues. Even though it’s a tiny fraction of all my intellectual efforts, it’s produced an enormous fraction of the people who don’t like me. I said something in 2018 about gender – applying an economic lens to the concept of sex inequality – which I thought was very mild, neutral, and thoughtful. I got so many people hating me that I had people actively disassociating from me, saying they couldn’t fund me or have me to their events, and basically accusing me of supporting rape and slavery.

A similar thing happened in 2010 when I wrote something related to gender and faced another strong reaction. I just learned that people are extremely sensitive about this, so sensitive that if you seem to be disagreeing with them, they will go completely nuclear and accuse you of being the evilest possible person. I really underestimated it.

My research over the past two years has helped me understand just how central gender attitudes are to shared world culture. Two years ago, I began focusing on fertility as an issue, and after about eight months, I decided that the underlying problem was culture. I’ve been spending my time there trying to figure out how culture works.

If you look at fertility, there are roughly half a dozen social trends that are the proximate causes of its decline. That includes norms around longer schooling, more parental attention paid to kids, less grandparent involvement in parenting, low religiosity, higher vanity, and moving from “cornerstone” in the past to today’s “capstone” marriages – marrying earlier in one’s life versus later.

Gender equality is a factor, too, of course. And so when you’re seen to be questioning any of these norms, you get fierce defenses from those believing that gender equality is being undermined. It shows just how fundamental it is to our culture. Any time I’m seen to be questioning or doubting any of the structure of these related norms, I face a huge war of opposition.

What’s something you believe is true that you don’t have proof of yet?

That it’s really hard to create consensus around morals or values. Many people believe that they have arguments that persuade people of certain morals or values. But when I look at their arguments, they aren’t persuasive to me. Most of the time, their arguments seem to be just a pointer toward some shared cultural element that gets the other person to say yes to them.

I do believe morals can be adaptive, such that the cultures that adopt them win. In that respect, they’re not arbitrary, but I don’t think there are objective ways to agree on what the right morals or values are.

Instead of talking about our morals, a better place to begin would be by thinking of what a “win-win” looks like between different parties. One of the key tools of economic analysis is figuring out where the Pareto frontier is for different parties with varied preferences. This is the point at which you can’t make one party better off without making the other worse off. As a first step, I think we should be finding the Pareto frontier of the topic we’re in – finding and negotiating it together. I think that would be much more productive than arguing about what our preferences or values should be.

If you had the power to assign a book for everyone on earth to read and understand, which book would you choose?

I would first pause and write that book! No existing book could compete with the book I would purposefully write to give to everyone.

A lot of people read for the sake of it. I think it’s much more effective intellectually to read with a purpose in mind. I have a post called “Chase Your Reading” that talks about this.

Rather than assign a book with no explicit purpose, I would rather create a book and label it with a purpose. If they ever encountered that purpose, then they could turn to the book and get much more out of it.

In some sense, I wrote Elephant in the Brain with this intent. There are so many people, especially young people, who would say to me, “Look, everybody’s bullshitting. All of these people are bullshitting all the time. What’s going on? How do I figure out what’s really happening in the world behind all of this bullshit everyone says?” For them, I can now say, “I have a book for you.”

How will future historians describe our current era?

I wrote an essay saying that historians will remember this period as the “dream time.” By that, I mean an era that is especially delusional and undisciplined by selective pressures or constraints.

As I mentioned, in the distant past, our world was fragmented with hundreds of thousands of little peasant cultures. Those groups had little communication with each other and little coordination. Plausibly, as we spread across the stars, we will fragment again. There will be no shared culture, these civilizations won’t be able to speak to each other quickly, and they’ll operate very differently.

We live in an unusual period in which our entire civilization is in close contact. We share values and norms, we trade, we inhabit the same organizations, we move around and meet each other and intermarry. We’re in such close contact that we almost share a single culture. We are, in effect, a first world-culture. We may not be the last. After our civilization falls, new ones might rise and create integrated empires before falling again; there could be several repetitions of this. But we are the first of perhaps half a dozen or maybe fewer.

Our civilization is rising now, reaching a peak soon, and then will fall. In the future, people will wonder, “Why couldn’t you see it was failing? Why didn’t you do something?” We ask the same things of those in the latter stages of the Roman Empire – it’s an obvious thing to ask from the outside. But from the inside, it doesn’t feel very natural. When I try to ask people about this, I’ll say, “You know, it looks like our civilization is failing. What do you think?” And most people will say, “Eh, I don’t care.”