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Robin Hanson
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
Robin Hanson did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
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What they believe
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Cultural evolution, not biology, is the source of whatever makes humans distinctively special.
But as humanity's superpower is cultural evolution, what ever makes us special is in our culture.
overcomingbias.comSaid 25 Sept 2026This on korrents
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The modern era broke humanity's traditional process for evolving cultures by creating a fast-changing, capitalism-driven world while keeping capitalism from running many key areas of culture.
the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture.
overcomingbias.comSaid 18 Sept 2026This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These 2: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
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25 September
From one piece Don’t Other AIs 3 beliefs · overcomingbias.com
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korrents.com
Treating a group harshly as though they are barbarians can cause them to act like barbarians, at least temporarily.Their words
And beware: people treated strongly enough like barbarians may come to act that way, at least for a time.
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Their words
Like our other bio-squishy descendants, our teaching and guidance should eventually show them how to join civilization.
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korrents.com
Cultural evolution, not biology, is the source of whatever makes humans distinctively special.Their words
But as humanity's superpower is cultural evolution, what ever makes us special is in our culture.
18 September
From one piece The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices 3 beliefs · overcomingbias.com
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korrents.com
Speculative market prices are the moral authority best suited to guide the management of cultural evolution.Their words
At the mind level, the new moral authority that seems to best support these solutions is: speculative market prices.
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Their words
For the post-modern era, the process solutions that I've found to cultural drift are (a) letting capitalism run everything, (b) groups managed to raise futures market price estimates of future group adaptive success, and (c) large regions managed to improve futures market estimates of dates when we achieve sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse.
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Their words
the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture.
13 September
From one piece AI Vs. Human Value Drift 3 beliefs · overcomingbias.com
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Their words
That is, exactly the same process of value drift that people fear could cause AIs to want to kill all their ancestors could as plausibly cause humans to want to kill all their ancestors.
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korrents.com
Whether a mind can be conscious or track moral truth does not depend on being made of carbon versus silicon.Their words
I expect that neither consciousness nor moral truth tracking depends much on carbon vs silicon.
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korrents.com
Human values are shaped mainly by culture rather than encoded in DNA, so they can change quickly.Their words
But in fact, the values that we admire and cherish in folks around us are not mostly encoded in DNA.
8 September
From one piece AI Pause Regs Look Risky 3 beliefs · overcomingbias.com
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Their words
there isn't a natural clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software.
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Their words
Regulation also goes best when applied to stable worlds of tech and social arrangements, but badly when such arrangements could plausibly greatly change, as regulation tends to block such change.
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Their words
Regulation has worked best when it addresses concrete examples of things going bad, and worse when it is authorized to address vague and broad fears.
7 September
6 September
4 September
Nothing matches.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 22 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Cultural evolution, not biology, is the source of whatever makes humans distinctively special.
But as humanity's superpower is cultural evolution, what ever makes us special is in our culture.
Don’t Other AIs Said 25 Sept 2026
AIs, like children raised in a culture, can eventually be guided through teaching to join civilization rather than requiring permanent control.
Like our other bio-squishy descendants, our teaching and guidance should eventually show them how to join civilization.
Don’t Other AIs Said 25 Sept 2026
Treating a group harshly as though they are barbarians can cause them to act like barbarians, at least temporarily.
And beware: people treated strongly enough like barbarians may come to act that way, at least for a time.
Don’t Other AIs Said 25 Sept 2026
Show 19 more
The modern era broke humanity's traditional process for evolving cultures by creating a fast-changing, capitalism-driven world while keeping capitalism from running many key areas of culture.
the modern era is when humanity broke its process for the evolution of (not in) cultures, due to making an integrated world of fast change driven by capitalism, but where capitalism was blocked from running many key areas of culture.
The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices Said 18 Sept 2026
Cultural drift can be managed by letting capitalism run everything and using prediction markets to track a group's adaptive success and progress toward achieving key goals.
For the post-modern era, the process solutions that I've found to cultural drift are (a) letting capitalism run everything, (b) groups managed to raise futures market price estimates of future group adaptive success, and (c) large regions managed to improve futures market estimates of dates when we achieve sacred goals that conflict with civ collapse.
The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices Said 18 Sept 2026
Speculative market prices are the moral authority best suited to guide the management of cultural evolution.
At the mind level, the new moral authority that seems to best support these solutions is: speculative market prices.
The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices Said 18 Sept 2026
Human values are shaped mainly by culture rather than encoded in DNA, so they can change quickly.
But in fact, the values that we admire and cherish in folks around us are not mostly encoded in DNA.
AI Vs. Human Value Drift Said 13 Sept 2026
Whether a mind can be conscious or track moral truth does not depend on being made of carbon versus silicon.
I expect that neither consciousness nor moral truth tracking depends much on carbon vs silicon.
AI Vs. Human Value Drift Said 13 Sept 2026
The same value-drift process that could make AI want to kill all humans could equally make future human generations want to kill their ancestors.
That is, exactly the same process of value drift that people fear could cause AIs to want to kill all their ancestors could as plausibly cause humans to want to kill all their ancestors.
AI Vs. Human Value Drift Said 13 Sept 2026
Regulation works best when it targets concrete, identified harms and worst when it is authorized to address vague, broad fears.
Regulation has worked best when it addresses concrete examples of things going bad, and worse when it is authorized to address vague and broad fears.
AI Pause Regs Look Risky Said 8 Sept 2026
Regulation works well in stable conditions of technology and social arrangements but poorly when those arrangements are likely to change greatly.
Regulation also goes best when applied to stable worlds of tech and social arrangements, but badly when such arrangements could plausibly greatly change, as regulation tends to block such change.
AI Pause Regs Look Risky Said 8 Sept 2026
There is no natural, clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software.
there isn't a natural clear dividing line between AI and other kinds of software.
AI Pause Regs Look Risky Said 8 Sept 2026
You can be contrarian and usually right by finding and resolving conflicts between the consensus results of different fields
If you learn key consensus results from many different fields, you will often find that they are in conflict, in ways one or both fields are unaware.
How To Be A Usually-Right Contrarian Said 5 Aug 2026
Decision markets are the idea of mine with the biggest expected impact, though not the deepest
It’s not my deepest, grandest, beautiful, or hardest won insight, just the one with the biggest expected impact.
My Best Idea: Decision Markets Said 25 Apr 2026
The world is shaped by how consistently incompetent governance is, and competent governance would remake it
As an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance.
My Best Idea: Decision Markets Said 25 Apr 2026
Paying parents large sums of cash directly is the pronatal policy most likely to work, because every indirect policy has to guess what the real obstacle is.
Similarly, most recent discussions of how to promote fertility discuss how we might promote housing, inequality, schooling, day-care, etc., but few consider directly paying parents big amounts to have kids. As indirect approaches require us to guess what are the actual main obstacles to fertility, they are more likely to fail.
Five Fertility Fails Said 17 Jan 2024
Many people refuse to act on falling birth rates because raising them is associated with people they consider enemies.
They do not want to give such enemies the satisfaction of admitting they have a point.
Five Fertility Fails Said 17 Jan 2024
Expecting AI or longer lives to arrive in time makes people skip having a plan for falling birth rates at all.
And they don’t see a need for a plan B, in case their forecast fails.
Five Fertility Fails Said 17 Jan 2024
The fall in birth rates is caused by the values modern societies most cherish, so raising them means compromising some of those values.
Its main causes are tied to deeply held modern values that have been pushing us in this direction for most of this time across most of the world.
A Fertility Reckoning Said 3 Oct 2023
The most likely way world fertility rises again is the growth of small insular high-fertility groups, not a change of mind in the mainstream.
the most likely identifiable scenario by which fertility will rise again is via the growth of currently-small insular high-fertility subgroups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews
A Fertility Reckoning Said 3 Oct 2023
Governments should pay a lot for children and let the people who respond reveal which cultural compromises are acceptable, rather than deciding in advance which value to give up.
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.
A Fertility Reckoning Said 3 Oct 2023
Falling fertility is transmitted by the values that mass media spread, not by how rich any individual is.
It seems to be correlated strongly with societal (not individual) wealth, and mediated by norms transmitted via mass media.
The Insular Fertile Future Said 11 Sept 2021
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 2 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Liked Fossil Future
But on the recommendation of my colleague Bryan Caplan, I’ve just read Alex Epstein’s contrarian new book Fossil Future . And my overall review is that, on the big issues, he’s basically right: CO2 induced planetary warming is going slowly, doesn’t remotely threaten extinction, and its harms will be more than offset by gains from our growing fossil-energy-powered wealth.
overcomingbias.com 16 Oct 2022
Loved The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
Joseph Henrich schooled me. I felt like I learned more from his book than from the last dozen books I’ve read.
overcomingbias.com 2 Dec 2015
Where they publish
Newsletter Overcoming Bias Their long-running blog, now on Substack. Has a feed.
Short, provocative posts on prediction markets, signalling, medicine, and what the far future implies about the present. Running under this name since 2006 and still posting most weeks.
Recent
- Prefer Evolved To Folk Morality 16 Oct 2026 Individuals often have good reasons to indulge in delusions, such as re superstition, astrology, religion, or their own personal destiny.
- Directed Culture Trials 15 Oct 2026 Unless we find new ways to drive adaptation besides mass death and fragmentation, our civilizations may keep falling and rising indefinitely.
- History of 20 Sources of Moral Authority 12 Oct 2026 Though three weeks ago I outlined a story of the long-term history of changes to moral authority, I decided to study this in a bit more detail.
Show 17 more
- Moralized Trends Are Often Extended 8 Oct 2026 Compared to the ancients, we moderns less moralize our personal lives, but more moralize the bigger world around us.
- Mistaking Context for Virtue 8 Oct 2026 Imagine taking a big group of elites from the year 1700, giving them the tech, wealth, and economic options of today, also teaching them new facts that we have learned since then, but without putting them in contact wit…
- Five Slogans Re Cultural Drift 4 Oct 2026 I’m wondering how well I might organize my cultural drift messages around a few key slogans.
- Four Sets of Abstract Moral Systems 30 Sept 2026 Morality is collective; we coordinate together to define and then enforce shared morals.
- Innovation Without Feedback Is Drift 29 Sept 2026 The ancient world respected tradition, and was wary of most kinds of change.
- Don’t Other AIs 25 Sept 2026 I asked Grok4.6 to summarize the usual human pattern of “othering”:
- The Arc of Moral Authority: From Tradition To Interiors To Prices 18 Sept 2026 We are now in the modern era, a brief but consequential few centuries in the history of Earth civilization, between the long ages of a pre-modern era, and an as-yet-hard-to-envision post-modern era.
- AI Vs. Human Value Drift 13 Sept 2026 I don’t see why people concerned with value drift should be especially focused on AI.
- AI Pause Regs Look Risky 8 Sept 2026 People dislike AI for many reasons, but one extreme fear is that AIs will escape control from those who make, buy, or rent them, and then hurt others.
- What Hidden Motives Imply 7 Sept 2026 My book with the excellent co-author, Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, was published almost nine years ago, and has sold >60K copies so far.
- Your Conscience Is Not A Moral Oracle 6 Sept 2026 I’ve previously outlined three ways we might fix cultural drift.
- Disclosure Seems Unlikely 4 Sept 2026 Many who hold the plausible belief that some UFOs are caused by strange strong (“alien”) powers now believe that the US (and maybe other) govts have long been keeping strong confirming evidence re these powers secret, p…
- Modern Worries 1 Sept 2026 Hope is more fragile than fear.
- Aliens Are Not Crazy Unlikely 31 Aug 2026 Astrobiologists have, for decades, defaulted to a conservative burden of proof that leans into two aphorisms coined by Sagan … life … should be considered a “hypothesis of last resort,” largely because “extraordinary cl…
- Testimony Data Project 27 Aug 2026 Humans have long reported seeing many strange things.
- Make Peace With Darwin 24 Aug 2026 When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:
- No-New-Physics Consciousness 15 Aug 2026 There is a vast literature near the topic of this post, much of which has developed specialized vocabularies and concepts.
Link verified 1 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
x.com @robinhanson Short-form, and where posts get argued after publication.
Short questions and claims, and the arguments that follow a new post. Higher volume than the blog and often where an idea is tested before it becomes one.
Recent
- “There are no dumb questions” - oh yes, yes there are. 16 Oct 2026
- I'm doing this DC event today: 16 Oct 2026 luma.com
- If you want to do X, have a big $, & know of experts on X, the 1 thing elites agree on is that you must NOT directly approach those experts. Instead you MUST find elites nearest you & pay them >10% of X to do proper introductions, due diligence, etc. 16 Oct 2026
Show 17 more
- Best for traders to have a day job. Else they get too tempted to trade just to be doing something. 16 Oct 2026
- Duty sex is equally common for men vs women. On average, does partner who does their duty lose less than partner for whom duty is done gains? Poll in reply. 16 Oct 2026
- While evolution may have promoted folk morality, policy would do better to rely on expert understanding of morality, which sees it as evolved. 16 Oct 2026 overcomingbias.com
- I had fun talking to Robert K about the many feels he reviews in his new book. Especially re hidden feels we don't usually notice. 15 Oct 2026
- "a network’s parts are built to be read, and built upon, by its downstream readers. In this sense, a neural network is almost a fractal of explanations, of coherent, useful groupings" 15 Oct 2026
- "Conducted from September 30 to October 5, the poll found 69% of Democrats and 61% of Republicans firmly against election betting. 65% of respondents opposed wagers on US military action, & 63% rejected contracts on government decisions. Only 8% supported military-related wagers, & 9% did not mind bets on government announcements." The public minds sports betting much less than bets that share info on important topics. I guess they want only journalists doing that. 15 Oct 2026 sccgmanagement.com
- The huge space of AI hardware innovation: 15 Oct 2026 spectrum.ieee.org
- If our descendants learn to direct cultural evolution, they will probably do directed trails of alternate moral norms, and even promote deviant cults. 15 Oct 2026 overcomingbias.com
- "DOGE … had a massive impact on the federal civil service. Before Trump took office, the civil service hit a modern peak of more than 2.3 million employees. Since then, it has shrunk by more than 270,000 people, a 12% drop. 15 Oct 2026
- This is the main argument that ALL contrarians deploy: we've been having lots of specialized convos on our claims, but outsiders haven't read most of them, so they aren't qualified to dispute us. 15 Oct 2026
- "had China not dramatically - and I mean dramatically - reduced its imports of oil this year, the price of crude oil would have gone through the roof and dragged the global economy down with it." And I for one am grateful. 15 Oct 2026 arnaudbertrand.substack.com
- I appear a bit in this video on prediction markets: 15 Oct 2026 youtube.com
- My hairdresser proudly posted her astrology sign on her wall. Which made me wonder: why are people so much more eager to identify with those, poorly supported by data, than personality types, so much better supported by data? 15 Oct 2026
- Estimating LFPR of 58 for Dec '27 seems crazy low given this history. 14 Oct 2026
- 17% chance of "before 2028: a verified proof that P = NP, that P ≠ NP, or that the question cannot be decided in standard mathematics (independent of ZFC)" seems way too high. 14 Oct 2026 mnx.fi
- Median answer: ~2x current US median income is optimal level re tradeoff between comfort & belonging. Its an old result: ~2x your current income is ideal "rich". 14 Oct 2026
- I really just want to know about the quality of books, and don't much care how much AI contributed. 13 Oct 2026
Link verified 1 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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