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Robin Hanson wrote an article recently on how his politics have drifted. For those not familiar with his he was one of the early rationalist adjacent that likely filters a lot of people here. As a GMU professor he blogged like the rest of their Econ department and marginal revolution which was much bigger for leading people to SSC. Also early intellectual promoter of prediction markets like in the ‘90s and use to co-blog with Hal Finney.
A few highlights: “ While it is okay to fiercely resist the immediate decline of a cherished value today, like say democracy or gender-equality, 3 top LLMs agree that is now taboo to explicitly work to help your culture persist, reproduce, and have continued influence centuries into the future.”
“ I’m not especially into liberty, democracy, legal due-process, or immigration, beyond their instrumental values in achieving other things.”
A lot of comments on cultural drift and risks with that. The second comment strikes me because I feel like I’ve been thinking about those issues a lot lately. And I feel like I too am moving to a political philosophy of common goodism and the other ideas are just means to achieve the good. Perhaps this is just the standard libertarian to fascism pipeline but I do think a lot of people are questioning whether America is still on a workable path. It’s easy to be a liberal-libertarian when society is broadly good/stable but in harder times more pragmatic ideas emerge.
Then he just comments on things everyone else has noticed - parasitic classes in big cities (often unions) just crushing QOL for the non-rich.
I use to read Hanson a lot, but I only read him a few times a year now. Some of his early insights turned out coming true. It’s interesting to me how minds that shared a lot of common thinking patterns end up developing similar conclusions today. Democracy, Liberty, due-process, and immigration were likely things I viewed as very positive a decade ago. Now I would likely consider them unimportant.
Hanson
I've not seen anyone talk about it but his statement that aliens are likely on Earth domesticating humanity to keep us from expanding further is insane and calls into question how his reasoning skills have developed over the years. Religious nutjobbery is one thing, but embracing alien conspiracies shows a broken mind.
I was surprised by this claim (my very loose knowledge of Robin Hanson hasn't flagged him up as insane), so I went to check it out. For anyone else lacking the context on this, here's what Hanson said (which I think magicalkittycat has represented faithfully):
Hanson links to a post where he expands on his position on UFOs. It's an interesting read. I think "insane" is a fair characterisation. In the first paragraph, we get:
Not a great start. It's frustrating that he doesn't bother distinguishing between whether he means "UFO-as-unidentified-flying-object" vs "UFO-as-alien-craft", which is absolutely load-bearing. It's the difference between "yes, obviously" and "you are lying to me".
I don't understand what's gone wrong in Hanson's brain here.
There is no possible content of a US military report that would make me go "What the Hell?", because "this report is false" is always a plausible hypothesis. It wouldn't make me go "What the Hell?" if I learned a military report were mistaken or a deliberate lie. So anything that has a higher WTF factor than a wrong report cannot possibly make me go "What the Hell?", because the report-is-mistaken hypothesis would defeat it!
It baffles me that he does this, right underneath his floating website banner which declares: "Overcoming Bias".
It gets worse:
... what? No, they don't.
"That is" isn't supposed to allow you to link two entirely different things! "Our best theories predict unicorns; that is, they predict universal gravitation". This isn't science; this isn't anything.
...
I expected the rest of the article to contain some kind of evidence for aliens, at least in Hanson's view. Instead, he performs an annoying series of shell games (including, I expect, on himself) to flip the burden of proof away from himself. Then, once he's confused himself and his readers enough to make it seem like he might have some kind of reasonable position, he constructs a ridiculously elaborate theory of exactly what type of aliens probably exist. It has the same kind of attitude as a stupidly written Sherlock Holmes deduction sequence ("there is chalk on your sleeve, therefore it must be chalk from the Prussian ambassador's club, therefore the ambassador's wife's diamond necklace is a fake!") or a lazy deist/specific-god equivocation ("there appears to be generic evidence for some kind of creator, therefore it is exactly my one specific god and my holy text is correct").
I agree with him on the meta level of "don't be ashamed to examine things just because people label them 'conspiracy theories'"; that's stupid. But the balance of probability on UFOs/UAPs is that they're natural, terrestrial phenomena. If aliens exist -- which I think is plausible -- they almost certainly exist much too far away to interact with us. (I'm pretty sure his version of panspermia, where a rock from a neighbouring system happens to hit not only the Solar System but Earth specifically, is insanely improbable -- even leaving aside questions like "could even a tardigrade survive the catastrophe of a massive meteoric impact?" I could be wrong about this, though.)
This is a shame. I've almost certainly read a bunch of Robin Hanson stuff in the past, and have probably trusted him as an expert in some capacity or other. I think this article from him is pretty disqualifying. This is egregious nonsense, and I'm glad mkc brought it up.
I am saying all this because I'm an alien participating in the cover-up, obviously.
I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
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