Category Archives: The Wisdom of Robin Hanson

The top 150 intellectuals, selected competitively

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We held the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft on Saturday. 10 owners competed. The owners came from the readership of this blog, and they themselves are not public figures in any way. The intellectuals they chose are shown below in the order they were selected. Because one owner arrived well after the draft had begun, the order in which teams picked was a bit mixed up.

Scoring for this season, which starts April 1 and ends June 30, is based on three categories:

(M) memes. These are phrases that are associated with a certain intellectual. For example, Black Swan is associated with Taleb (pick 31). If during the season the term Black Swan is used in at least three prominent places (well-known podcast or blog, newspaper, new book), that scores one M for Taleb. No more than one M per season for each catch-phrase. Richard Dawkins, who coined the term “meme,” was not chosen, although picking him would have guaranteed his owner at least one meme point.

(B) bets. An intellectual scores a B by expressing a belief in quantitative probabilistic terms. Oddly enough, Annie Duke, who would be credited with a meme if the phrase “Thinking in Bets” were to appear three times during the season, was not selected, either.

(S) steel-manning. The intellectual presents a point of view with which he or she disagrees in a way that someone who holds that point of view would consider to be representative. It is the opposite of straw-manning. I believe that Peter Thiel (pick 70) coined the term, or at least popularized it, and his owner is all but certain to pick up an M point. S’s are most likely to be earned by bloggers and podcasters and least likely to be earned by tweets or political speeches. They are more likely to be earned by centrists than by hard-core Red or Blue team members.

Tyler Cowen (pick 2) is a solid three-category player. He sometimes states beliefs in terms of probabilities, he tries to steel-man (although at times he can be too terse to earn a point), and he has meme candidates, such as Great Stagnation or “mood affiliation.”

Scott Alexander (pick 4) is likely to be a monster in the S and B categories.

I think that for next season I would add a category (R), for summarizing the research on two (or more) sides of a controversial issue. I would score one R for every 2 examples. I don’t want to give away an R to someone who just looks at research on a single topic during the season. Adding the (R) category would make Tyler and Scott even stronger candidates.

I will note that I thought that about a third of the picks reflected mood affiliation, and I would not have chosen them. I don’t want to pick on any owner in particular, but I’ll just say that I don’t think politicians will score points, and I will not be rooting for whoever took Oren Cass. By the end of this season, all of the picks will have track records, and those should inform owners who compete in a follow-up season.

I would caution the reader not to pay too much attention to relative ranking within this list. If there had been ten drafts, with ten different sets of owners, the average order would represent a consensus rank. But with only one iteration, the results reflect individual idiosyncrasies. In your comments, I am not interested in what picks you don’t like or what picks you think should have gone higher. I am interested in suggestions for intellectuals who seem likely to earn at least 3 points but who were not chosen.

Much as I poor-mouth my connections, I can brag by saying that in recent years I have had lunch and/or exchanged text messages with pick numbers 2, 5, 13, 32, 37, 38, 42, 95, 97, 132, and 147. I have met several others in person, but not recently. I believe that a social graph of the picks would show Tyler Cowen (2) and Marc Andreessen (97) as having the most dense connections with other picks.

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FITs update

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I already have a list of over 200 intellectuals for the Fantasy Intellectual Teams draft. Thanks for your suggestions. More are still welcome. You are not limited to any proposed team.

I should say that the way a fantasy draft works, owners take turns drafting players. You cannot just say “Tyler is on my team.” Somebody else could pick him first. So if there were 10 owners of these 18-intellectual teams, and there are 200 to choose from, then you can be sure to wind up in the last rounds drafting some folks that were put on the draft list by me or someone else but who you would not have intended to draft as of now.

One scoring issue that I am wrestling with is name recognition. The goal of FITs is to increase name recognition for intellectuals that deserve it. That might suggest downgrading anyone who has high name recognition among, say, Ivy League social science professors. So David Brooks, Jared Diamond, or Daniel Kahneman would not help your score, because they already have plenty of name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. Someone like Joe Rogan, who enjoys mass name recognition, does not lose points, because I guess he has low name recognition among Ivy League social science professors. And Rand Paul has name recognition among elites, but not as an intellectual, so he does not lose points for that. Note that I am not pushing Joe Rogan or Rand Paul for high draft choices.

But another possibility is to ignore that issue. I want my FITs to be people who are great role models as thinkers. I want my children to model their thought processes after my FITs team. If that means Steven Pinker or Joseph Henrich, so be it.

In fantasy sports, a “sleeper” is someone gets overlooked by other fantasy owners during the draft, so that you can pick the player up in a late round. As one commenter pointed out, in fantasy baseball you win the draft by picking good sleepers. In FITs, Jim Manzi is an outstanding sleeper.

But somebody who has a cult following in a particular realm is not necessarily a helpful sleeper. How to score Gary Taubes, for example? He gets credit for going against conventional wisdom in the field of diet, but otherwise I don’t think he has much value in the draft.

I am not inspired by FITs candidates that you like for “mood affiliation” reasons. I enjoy Victor Davis Hanson as a writer, but I know what one of his columns is going to say before I even read it. That is a bad sign. And he is too uncharitable to those with whom he disagrees.

One reason that my choices skew so far to the right is that I see those on the left relying much more heavily on mood affiliation. Few left intellectuals are charitable toward, or even aware of, important conservative arguments.

FITs who have influenced my view of the world are way up there in terms of draft choices. This can be true even though I reject important parts of their view of the world. Robin Hanson has never convinced me that uploading someone’s brain into a computer is going to be a big thing, but he has convinced me of all sorts of other important ideas.

Handle’s criteria are also on target.

Wisdom of Robin Hanson

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Robin Hanson interviewed by Brian Beckcom. Worth listening to the whole thing or reading the whole transcript. Some excerpts:

one of the most important things that happens to us is that we might get accused of violating a norm. And in that case, we want to be ready to defend ourselves to say that we aren’t violating a norm. And that’s overwhelmingly important. So important that your conscious mind is not really the president or king of your mind. It’s the press secretary. Its job is mainly to keep track of what you’re doing and always have a story about why what you’re doing was okay and not violating norms.

. . .we are quite ready to open to the idea that other people are making mistakes and other people are biased and other people have hidden motives. And that’s going to be the case in politics. Politics is obviously a scenario where we have conflicts. And so, the other side is going to be a plausible candidate to us of people who are falling for biases and mistakes and who have motives that they aren’t aware of because we’re happy to attribute the other side to their terrible mistakes and motives. Whereas for our side, we don’t think that needs to be invoked because we’re doing the reasonable thing and they’re doing the unreasonable thing.

He talks about the difference between elites, who have influence, and experts who have, well, expertise.

There’s a whole bunch of complicated things going into choosing elites, but basically they are two different games played by different rules that overlap. And so, one of the more interesting things is elites often try to hide the elite game they play and pretend to be experts or pretend to be something else. And, but often, you know, and in some sense, the Nobel prize winner shows you that, in fact, the elite game is the game most people would like to join if they could. Even Nobel prize winners say, “Too bad I’m only an expert. I’m not an elite. Because I want to go try to be one of these elites.”

Consider the pandemic.

Pandemic experts have had their standard story about what to do in a pandemic that goes back decades. And, you know, you can look on all their standard writings about, you know, what to do about travel bans or what to do about masks or what to do about quarantines and all those sorts of things. And they’ve had their standard story about what to do in a pandemic. And there was no particularly new information that showed up except as soon as we had a pandemic, all the experts, all the elites in the world suddenly decided, “That’s a subject to talk about.” The elites went wild talking to each other about pandemics and the elites decided that they did want masks and they did what quarantines and lockdowns, and they did want travel bans. And so, the elites declared that was the better thing. And they, the experts, caved immediately. As soon as the elites declared that that was better, the experts changed their mind about what the expert judgment was just like in 1984.

On how to control your biases:

Change your incentives. So, for example, one way to change your incentives about almost any topic is to make a bet about it. As soon as someone says to you, after something you said, “Do you want to bet,” your mental process immediately switches. You suddenly – well, from the moment you said it, it sounded clear and clean and believable and obvious even, and as soon as someone says “wanna bet,” you immediately start to wonder how you could be wrong.

. . .Have fewer opinions. And in each topic, ask yourself, “Do I need an opinion on this? Am I, you know, especially good at this?” And if you don’t need an opinion or you don’t have any special expertise compared to other people you could rely on, then don’t have an opinion on it.

And yes, of course, he is on the list for Fantasy Intellectual Teams (FITs).

Gossip resolution courts?

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Robin Hanson writes,

Today social media has amped up the power of gossip. Crowds can now form opinions on more cases, and thus enforce more norms on more people. But this has also revived the ancient problem of gossip rushing to judgement.

Sounds familiar.

Robin proposes this:

I seriously propose that some respectable independent groups create non-government non-profit “Cancel Courts”. When a crowd starts to complain about a target, these courts can quickly announce some mix of a speedy investigation and trial on this complaint. They’d solicit evidence from both sides, study it, and then eventually announce their verdict.

I see this as a proposal for resolving issues of social media gossip using a prestige mechanism. But the people who are using this tool are doing so to make a dominance move. They see prestige as a tool of the white supremacist patriarchy.

Virus update

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1. Timothy Taylor has a useful discussion and links regarding the issue of whether lockdowns have a large effect over and above voluntary changes in behavior.

2. The president told me [Marc Siegel] in a late July interview that he was more excited about therapeutics in the short term even than vaccines. Does that mean he reads my blog?

3. The average daily death rate has trended up recently.

4. Robin Hanson writes,

those virus harm estimates come from assuming a $7M value for each of these lives lost, and that I say does seem crazy.

He refers to estimates by David Cutler and Larry Summers of the direct harm caused by the virus vs. the indirect cost of prevention measures. The thrust of Robin’s post is that the cost of the prevention measures was probably higher than the cost of the virus, and that we are “over-preventing” COVID. I want to question that conclusion.

We should be cautious about employing the notion of “lost GDP.” There are two states of the world, one in which some activities have little or no perceived risk and the other in which those activities have a significant perceived risk. The value of “output” for those activities differs under those two states of the world.

Note that most of the prevention measures were voluntary. Many of us are making decisions to restrict travel, social activities, and in-person shopping. Our revealed preferences indicate that the GDP that we are thus giving up is worth less to us than the value of risk prevention.

Think of it as a relative price shift. Valuing today’s output at yesterday’s relative prices can be misleading.

Paternalism is a dominance move

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Robin Hanson writes,

Like most animals, humans strive to dominate each other, in order to rise in the local “pecking order”. And control over ourselves and others is widely taken as one of the strongest signs of dominance and non-submission. But unlike other animals, humans have norms against overt dominance and submission, and norms promoting pro-social behavior, that helps others. So we do push to dominate, but we pretend that we are actually just trying to help. And as usual, we are typically not consciously aware of our hypocrisy. In our mind, we are mainly aware of how they are doing the wrong things, and how they would be so much better off if only we could make them do things our way.

I am fond of the dichotomy between prestige hierarchies and dominance hierarchies. You get prestige by being good at something. You get dominance by imposing your will on others. For me, it’s pretty simple. Yay for prestige moves, boo for dominance moves. Actually, it gets complicated because the process for creating norms for prestige can involve dominance moves.

As an aside, a reader points out that Robin Hanson engages in asymmetric insight, which means not taking people at their word. An essential part of Robin’s outlook is his view that people’s true motives differ from what they themselves claim or even believe them to be. I would love to see a debate between Robin and Jeffrey Friedman on this issue. Jeffrey thinks that not taking people at their word is a violation of intellectual charity.

General update, April 15

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1. Robin Hanson writes,

to the extent pandemic policy is driven by biomed academics, don’t expect it to be very flexible or abstractly reasoned. And my personal observation is that, of the people I’ve seen who have had insightful things to say recently about this pandemic, most are relatively flexible and abstract polymaths and generalists, not lost-in-the-weeds biomed experts.

Read the whole post. He offers many interesting hypotheses, including an explanation for why you have to fire many of the generals who rose through the ranks during peacetime.

2. John Cochrane writes,

From the March 4 and April 8 Fed H.1 data, we learn that the Fed held $2,502 billion and $3,634 billion Treasury securities on those dates, an increase of $1,132 billion. From the Treasury debt to the minute page, we learn that debt held by the public (including the Fed) rose from $17,469 billionaires to $18,231 billion — a (huge) rise of $762 billion. $9 trillion at an annual rate. The Fed bought all the Treasury debt, printing new money to do it, and then some. On net, the government financed the entire $762 billion by printing new money and printed up another $370 billion to buy back that much existing treasury debt.

Later, he writes,

Inflation comes basically if the US hits a debt crisis.

I would say that we only get hyper-inflation if there is a debt crisis. But I believe that we can get at least a 1970s-style inflation without a debt crisis. We are keeping people home and getting them laid off, which means that they are not producing anything of value. Yet we are giving them funds as if they were still producing, which they will then spend on stuff that other people produced. Regardless of what games the Fed plays with interest on reserves, we have more money chasing fewer goods, and that means inflation.

As it stands now, inflation is being repressed by a form of price controls, in the form of laws and social norms against “price gouging.” If it weren’t for those laws and norms, prices would be soaring for the things that people want to hoard (masks, toilet paper), many grocery products, and stuff that we used to get easily from China.

3. Eric Boehm writes,

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that has already prompted Congress to hike spending by $2.2 trillion (with more likely on the way), and with revenue collections likely to drop in a big way as a result of the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown, the federal government is facing the prospect of a budget deficit of nearly $4 trillion this year.

4. Concerning age and obesity as risk predictors, Christopher M. Petrilli and others write,

In the decision tree for [hospital] admission, the most important features were age >65 and obesity. . .Age and comorbidities are powerful predictors of hospitalization; however, admission oxygen impairment and markers of inflammation are most strongly associated with critical illness.

The most recent NYC data show only 133 deaths out of 6589 were among people who were deemed as having no underlying conditions. The footnote in the table lists only medical conditions such as cancer or heart disease, but it does not include obesity. Also, the table includes 1422 deceased individuals who are not classified as either having or not having underlying conditions but instead are deemed “underlying conditions unknown.”

Thanks to commenters for pointers.

5. The WSJ reports,

CVS—where Mr. Lackey heads up talent acquisition—is now taking on the most ambitious hiring drive in its history. To recruit the 50,000 staffers it needs to meet a coronavirus-fueled surge in business, it is partnering with Gap Inc., Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. . .Delta Air Lines Inc. . . . and dozens of other companies to employ their laid-off workers. More than 900,000 people have applied for CVS jobs in just the last few weeks, including roles stocking warehouses and stores, answering phones at call centers or stepping in for CVS staff who end up sick or quarantined.

As the government and many pundits try to figure out how to make the economy revert to what it used to be, the market tries to find patterns of sustainable specialization and trade.

6. Meanwhile, Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Michael Weber write,

the employment-to-population ratio has declined sharply. Using the adjusted metrics described above, we find that the employment ratio fell from 60% of the population down to 52.2%, a nearly eight percentage point decline. . . this decline in employment is enormous by historical standards and is larger than the entire decline in the employment-to-population ratio experienced during the Great Recession. Given that the US civilian non-institutional population is approximately 260 million, this drop in the employment-to-population ratio is equivalent to 20 million people losing their jobs. This drop is even larger than the 16.5 million new unemployment claims over this time period.

7. Tyler Cowen writes,

Any model of optimal policy should be “what should we do now, knowing the lockdown can’t last very long?” rather than “what is the optimal length of lockdown?”

But we are still flying blind. I am hopeful that asymptomatic spreaders are unlikely to kill people, other than those who are very old or very obese, but this is just a conjecture. As far as I know, we still don’t know the prevalence of the doorknob effect, or the importance of viral load. We have no idea whether there are 1 million people in this country with immunity, or 20 million. We don’t know about the effectiveness of masks and scarves.

We need to replace the peacetime public health leadership, which only knows how to scold and cower, with some actual scientists determined to answer these urgent questions.

8. Maybe we do know something about the effect of enclosed spaces. Hua Qian and others write,

Home outbreaks were the dominant category (254 of 318 outbreaks; 79.9%), followed by transport (108; 34.0%; note that many outbreaks involved more than one venue category). Most home outbreaks involved three to five cases. We identified only a single outbreak in an outdoor environment, which involved two cases. Conclusions: All identified outbreaks of three or more cases occurred in an indoor environment

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Also from Tyler and possibly related: Travis P. Bagett and others write,

testing of an adult homeless shelter population in Boston shortly after the identification of a COVID-19 case cluster yielded an alarming 36% positivity rate. The vast majority of newly identified cases had no symptoms and no fever on a single point-in-time assessment

9. From the Hollywood Reporter,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday announced a broad six-point plan to reopen the state’s economy and relax strict Safer at Home guidelines.

The six points sound more like conditions that must be achieved before relaxing restrictions. For example,

the ability to monitor and protect communities through testing, tracking positive cases, properly isolate and support individuals who are positive and/or exposed to COVID-19.

A few weeks ago, the focus was on avoiding hospitals becoming overwhelmed. But that is only one of the Newsom’s conditions. Somewhere along the way, we went beyond the goal of reducing infection risk as a means to preserve scarce medical resources. The goal now seems to be reducing infection risk as an end in itself. Once we accept that as a vital government objective, the default becomes indefinite infringement on liberty.

Catch phrases, intellectuals, and shelf life

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Scholar’s Stage writes,

tweeters maintained that no one who was a prominent writer and thinker in the aughts has aged well through the 2010s.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who offers some characteristically terse and contrarian suggestions for how a public intellectual might maintain a long shelf life.

I would note the irony of using Twitter to sniff at others’ short shelf lives. My other thoughts:

1. What do we mean by “shelf life?” To me, it means being a focal point for discussion for a long time. I would focus on the shelf life of one’s ideas rather than on one’s personal shelf life. For example, Paul Krugman has had a long personal shelf life, but I can think of only one of his ideas–the liquidity trap–as having a long shelf life, and very little of his personal shelf life depends on that idea.

2. Note that an idea does not have to be accepted universally to have a long shelf life. Many of us do not buy the liquidity trap.

3. Note that an idea does not have to hold up well to have a long shelf life. “The End of History” has enjoyed a long shelf life.

4. Catchy phrases help an idea’s shelf life. Bell Curve, Bowling Alone, The Long Tail. John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson were skilled at producing phrases that caught on.

5. The Original Position is another great catch phrase. I think that Rawls has enjoyed a much longer shelf life than he deserved. Perhaps because his book had at least one other great catch phrase, Justice as Fairness.

6. r>g is another compelling catch phrase. Who would have thought?

6. Tyler is good at coming up with phrases that catch on: Great Stagnation, Average is Over. Others who have coined more than one successful catch phrase include Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, and Peter Thiel.

7. Robin Hanson probably has come up with more ideas that deserve a long shelf life than anyone I can think of, but he needs better catch-phrases.

8. I have plenty of ideas with good catch phrases: Null Hypothesis, PSST, Suits vs. Geeks, stimulate demand and restrict supply, three axes, etc. But they don’t get picked up and amplified by other people. Perhaps because I have not followed Tyler’s second rule of advice, which is “Avoid criticizing other public intellectuals.” Maybe that’s really the most important rule of all.

Hansonian medical checkups

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Toshiaki Iizuka, Katsuhiko Nishiyama, Brian Chen, and Karen Eggleston write,

despite the significant increase in medical care utilization at the borderline threshold, we find no evidence that the additional care improves health outcomes. This is true both for intermediate health measures and for predicted risks of mortality and serious complications. Thus, we find no evidence that DM-related medical care is cost-effective around this threshold. The results hold both in the shortrun (one year after a checkup) as well as in the medium-run (three years after a checkup). These results suggest that the threshold may need to be reexamined from the perspective of cost-effectiveness.

DM is diabetes mellitus.