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Robin Hanson Newsletter
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15 September
14 September
13 September
12 September
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Their words
the best way to think about AI is as another social, political, cultural and economic shock in the series of shocks that have been underway over the long industrial revolution.
How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com
7 September
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Their words
especially with AI now I'd say anyone can try, and non-technical people with the best ideas, creativity/taste and understanding of whatever cultural zeitgeist we're in can win
4 September
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Their words
The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment
3 September
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korrents.com
Europe's dominant cultural spirit is anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress.Their words
Portugal's choice is cultural though and completely fits the general spirit in Europe which is fully anti-tech, anti-AI, anti-entrepreneurship, anti-business and anti-progress
31 August
24 August
20 August
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Their words
so I'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity.
13 August
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korrents.com
Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.Their words
much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success
30 July
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Their words
Um, and sometimes that's because the model is trying to do something it doesn't have a lot of experience doing. So it's been trained on a whole set of things and as soon as you get a little bit off the distribution of things it knows how to do then like most machine learning models it will you know its performance will suddenly will start to degrade and the farther you get off the comfort zone of what it knows how to do the the more likely it is to to not work as well.
28 July
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Their words
I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. Um I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness and startups will continue to be important forever.
21 July
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Remembering Indonesia from My GrandpaTheir words
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
19 July
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Their words
It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
13 July
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korrents.com
Human rights, logic, progress and the very idea of an independent self are all children of the written word.Their words
essentially every cultural attribute that we celebrate – from human rights, to logic, to progress, to the very notion of an independent self – are conceptual children born from the mind-shaping power of the written word.
12 July
From one piece A self-absorbed giant 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
China had more ideological influence in the world during the Cultural Revolution than it has today.Their words
Paradoxically, China might have had more soft power when it followed self-destructive policies of Maoist Cultural Revolution.
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korrents.com
China's cultural and intellectual output to the world is far smaller than its economic weight.Their words
It surely does not “produce” one quarter of world culture or intellectual activity (if the latter is defined as influential books, of fiction and non-fiction, politics, history; films, plastic arts, music, theater etc.)
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Their words
The primary axis is no longer the politico-economic axis of capitalism-vs-communism, but the ethno-cultural axis of ethnomasochism-vs-ethnonationalism.
22 June
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Their words
And there is Jeremy A. Simmons, Sea of Treasures: A Cultural History of Ancient Indian Ocean Trade
16 June
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Their words
It is often the case that a work which contains radically unusual ideas will drift along being not particularly zoomed in on by society and not widely read until it hits a moment that the new questions being asked in that century or that decade are answered by something in that text.
28 May
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Their words
"Slop" is fast becoming the central metaphor for the cultural output of the late twenty-twenties.
8 May
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Their words
Uh and 98% of it is other factors, especially genetic drift. So it's overwhelmingly migrations and population structure causing fluctuations in frequency.
1 May
29 March
From one piece Chip Huyen: Building when it feels like there's nothing left to build - The Pragmatic Summit 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I don't think that human preference is just an equation that people can just like package nicely and like, "Hey, ask people like which which of these two answers people would prefer?" It's very very personal, very culturally dependent, geographically dependent, age dependent.
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Their words
But in Vietnam and also in a lot of other Asian countries, people are on the move all the time. Like people are on the motorbike all the time. So, they actually really don't like typing. So, the voice like a lot of the companies in Vietnam actually deploy voice bots before they do uh do chatbot.
20 March
From one piece Skill Issue: Andrej Karpathy on Code Agents, AutoResearch, and the Loopy Era of AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Model intelligence should speciate like the animal kingdom rather than converge on one oracle that knows everything.Their words
I do think we should expect more speciation in the intelligences. Um like, you know, the animal kingdom is extremely diverse in the brains that exist and there's lots of different niches of of nature and some animals have overdeveloped visual cortex or other part kind of parts and I think we we should be able to see more speciation and um you don't need like this oracle that knows everything.
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Their words
And I think if you're outside of that frontier lab, your your judgment fundamentally will start to drift because you're not part of the you know, what's coming down the line. And so I feel like my judgment will inevitably start to drift as well.
1 January
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us SmarterTheir words
A decade on, it already feels possible that in the future, commentators will argue that this specific fruitful synthesis lit the fuse on evolutionary cultural anthropology’s explosion (with due apologies to earlier books from L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, E. O. Wilson, Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd).
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Their words
Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.
25 December 2025
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korrents.com
Rebuilding American manufacturing is a decades-long educational and cultural project, not something tariffs can do.Their words
America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.
22 December 2025
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Likedrcmnd.app
Religions of Early India: A Cultural HistoryTheir words
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
18 December 2025
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Their words
the UAE's tech aspirations are clearly downstream of a deeper affinity with the West.
8 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Decline of DevianceTheir words
My favorite recent piece on our cultural stagnation is Adam Mastroianni’s
1 December 2025
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korrents.com
Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.Their words
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
29 November 2025
16 November 2025
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Their words
Making licenses suddenly commercial for big entities? You are forcing people to go back through the Procurement process. They will shift over time back to a FOSS solution, even if it is less good.
15 September 2025
9 September 2025
1 July 2025
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Their words
cultural engineering is extremely difficult in the 21st century: in this age of infinite personalisation, people can swipe past anything they dislike
30 May 2025
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Their words
This shared past between Persians and Jews is etched into my consciousness and that of many Israelis and Iranians. It will outlast the predations of the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolution of 1979.
19 April 2025
16 April 2025
5 March 2025
21 August 2024
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korrents.com
Therapists overestimate their own effectiveness by about 65%, and it is not a Western cultural artifact.Their words
Since 2012 when the first study appeared in the literature, others have been published documenting the tendency of practitioners to overestimate their effectiveness - on average, by 65% (1, 2).
Alas, it seems everyone comes from Lake Wobegonwritings.scottdmiller.com
19 August 2024
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Lovedrcmnd.app
The Tinkerings of Robert NoyceTheir words
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce -- the origins and cultural context of Fairchild and Intel.
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Season of the WitchTheir words
Season of the Witch -- a cultural history of San Francisco from the late 60s to the early 80s.
12 April 2024
5 April 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
Between Us: How Cultures Create EmotionsTheir words
Cultural psychology, studying emotions through the lens of culture. Your emotions are created by your culture. You should not be too sure that you share the emotional experiences of individuals from other cultures. Culture and emotion make each other up. Great insights!
26 March 2024
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korrents.com
Shame is used as a tool of cultural coercion because it reliably makes people shrink and stop taking action.Their words
shame has been sharpened into a tool for cultural coercion and compliance. That what people have figured out is that shame is a is a soft spot on almost everybody. And if you press that spot, people will shrink. They will run away. It is particularly used against women, but it is used against large numbers of people to cause them to not take an action.
20 February 2024
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korrents.com
The DEI movement on campus comes out of a Marxist socialist way of looking at the world.Their words
A friend of mine sent me Christopher Rufo's book, America's Cultural Revolution, which is sort of a sociological study of the origins of the DEI movement and critical race theory. I found it actually one of the more important books I've read and also I found it quite concerning. Ultimately, DEI comes out of a kind of Marxist socialist way to look at the world.
23 January 2024
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Their words
As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.
3 October 2023
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Their words
It seems to me that an attractive robust approach is to have governments pay lots for kids (at no cost or risk to them!) and then let those who respond to these incentives tell us which compromises seem most attractive.
29 June 2023
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
The Essays of Warren BuffettTheir words
Packed with decades of wit and wisdom from the world's most famous investor, this collection makes the Oracle of Omaha accessible to everyone.
7 February 2023
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korrents.com
A cultural focus on psychological health, meditation included, is one of the great obstacles to human progress.On changing their mind
I think meditation has been very good for me and that it would be very good for a lot of other people too.
18 January 2023
25 July 2022
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Their words
In my opinion the root cause of this bug is that when a white american developer sees a terminal they immediately interpret it as this idealized cartesian plane where they can lay out any writing they want in neatly-spaced characters that behave in "predictable" ways (in other words, behave exactly like English).
1 July 2022
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Early China: A Social and Cultural HistoryTheir words
Feng Li's Early China: A Social and Cultural History is a staid yet serviceable overview of the pre-imperial period.
25 January 2022
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Their words
I I would I would not say that about Google. I would just say that more generally like that is the incumbent temptation. Um it is is basically is basically go from attack mode to defend mode, right? Go from being the pirate to being the navy.
11 January 2022
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Likedrcmnd.app
How Star Wars Conquered the UniverseTheir words
Though this book frequently digresses into discussions of the cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise, it also contains one of the most thoroughly-researched biographies of Lucas currently available.
1 January 2022
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korrents.com
China's cultural and intellectual output to the world is far smaller than its economic weight.Their words
Never has any economy grown so much while producing so few cultural exports.
1 January 2021
22 November 2020
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