Robin Hanson

Jan 16, 2025 | overcomingbias.com | Robin Hanson

Christians often ask themselves, as a guide to living, “What would Jesus do?” In her new book Open Socrates, my podcast-cohost Agnes Callard suggests we instead ask “What would Socrates do?”Over 2400 years ago, Socrates gained fame by asking people questions on important topics, and then finding contradictions in their answers. Most didn’t like it, and eventually his city Athens killed him for it.

Jan 10, 2025 | overcomingbias.com | Robin Hanson

As I’ve attributed a large fraction of human behaviors to signaling incentives, I feel I should address a key signaling question, about which I was recently reminded. All else equal, we prefer others to think that we are smarter, healthier, and richer. And we take many concrete actions to promote such impressions. But most all of these actions only indirectly signal such desirable features. Which tends to induce wasteful signaling efforts, relative to more direct signals.

Jan 5, 2025 | overcomingbias.com | Robin Hanson

The films A Complete Unknown, on Bob Dylan, and In Restless Dreams, on Paul Simon, make vivid to me the huge emotional appeal of becoming a musician like them. It’s not just that you get rich and millions love you. It’s your being part of a big youth movement, all of whom can just see how the world has gone emotionally and morally wrong on key issues, but where a few of you can express your feelings so directly, authentically, and eloquently as to compel anyone who listens honestly to agree.

Dec 31, 2024 | overcomingbias.com | Robin Hanson

Star Wars came out when I was 17, and made a big impression on me; I loved it. It wasn’t until years later that I noticed it didn’t bother to offer evidence that the Empire was worth overthrowing. The movie instead relied on dozens of standard tricks to get viewers to just assume its view. (Andor later filled this gap.) We humans are plausibly adapted to be vulnerable to such tricks, to help us assimilate to cultures we are born in, and stay aligned with those cultures as they change.

Dec 28, 2024 | overcomingbias.com | Robin Hanson

As futarchy interest and activity are way up lately, this seems a good time to elaborate on one of its most technical issues, one that @metaproph3t also discussed recently: decision selection bias. To make a decision, one wants estimates of the outcome that would be caused by each possible decision. But decision markets instead give estimate of outcomes conditional on each possible decision. Selection biases can cause a difference between conditional and causal outcome estimates.