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Robin Hanson - The Long View

Overview

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Highlights

Transcript

Chapters

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Robin Hanson - The Long View

Dwarkesh Podcast

2020/08/31
Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

2020/08/31
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Robin Hanson is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em.   Robin's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robinhanson Robin's blog: https://www.overcomingbias.com/  Robin's website: h...

Highlights

In this podcast, economist Robin Hanson explores the hidden motives behind human behavior, from conversation and politics to parenting and academia. He argues that much of what we do is driven by signaling and dominance rather than the conscious reasons we give, and he applies this lens to a wide range of topics, including the future of work, institutional reform, and the nature of intelligence.
12:31
The future will be dominated by self-promoting entities.
18:10
Conscious mind functions as a press secretary
23:11
Meditation may not reduce delusion without specific evidence.
35:28
80% of human behavior is signaling.
39:28
Conversation is a game of signaling
46:20
Loyalty signaling often outweighs ability signaling in politics
52:04
Nerds analyze social interactions explicitly due to lacking intuitive skills.
54:51
Academia prioritizes impressiveness over originality or usefulness.
1:04:04
Paternalism often serves the parent's desire for dominance.
1:09:34
Predictions often rely on naive theories about work
1:26:36
Relative performance often matters more than absolute performance.
1:28:05
Internal political coalitions often prioritize their own interests over firm-wide profit
1:32:13
Institutional innovation comes from random change and trial-and-error.

Chapters

The long view
00:00
Subconscious vs conscious intelligence
15:07
Meditators
20:28
Signaling, norms, and motives
26:50
Conversation
36:50
2020 election nominees
42:54
Nerds in startups and social science
49:25
Academia and Robin
54:50
Dominance explains paternalism
58:20
Remote work
1:09:32
Advice for 20 yr old
1:21:26
Idea futures
1:28:05
Reforming institutions
1:32:13

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, Robin Hanson needs an introduction. So let's begin. So you've written a few essays on the long view, how? There's no significant players that are optimizing for it. But isn't the most obvious explanation for that, that optimizing for ...