ACX
Contra Hanson On Medical Effectiveness
Scott Alexander challenges Robin Hanson's claim that medicine doesn't work by analyzing health insurance studies and presenting evidence of medicine's effectiveness.
51 min read 7,819 words
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Robin Hanson
Essays tagged “Robin Hanson”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Essays on Robin Hanson
20 essaysSSC
Why Not More Excitement About Prediction Aggregation?
Scott Alexander examines the underutilization of prediction aggregation platforms like Metaculus, exploring potential reasons and expressing surprise at their lack of widespread adoption.
7 min read 931 words
SSC
Ascended Economy?
Scott Alexander speculates on a future 'ascended economy' where AI-run corporations dominate, discussing potential implications and risks of such a system.
19 min read 2,884 words
SSC
Book Review: Age of Em
Scott Alexander reviews Robin Hanson's 'Age of Em', praising its creativity while critiquing its assumptions and arguing the future may be even stranger.
59 min read 9,060 words
SSC
Prediction Goes To War
Scott Alexander explores how perfect predictions of war outcomes, through oracles or prediction markets, could potentially prevent wars, and extends this concept to conflicts between superintelligent AIs.
9 min read 1,379 words
SSC
Growing Children For Bostrom’s Disneyland
Scott explores a dystopian future scenario of hyper-optimized economic productivity, speculating on the emergence of new patterns and forms of life from this 'economic soup'.
15 min read 2,254 words
SSC
CONSTANT VIGILANCE!
Scott Alexander argues that rationality should be viewed as habit cultivation rather than a limited resource, drawing parallels with aikido and lucid dreaming techniques.
8 min read 1,099 words
SSC
Don’t Fear The Filter
Scott Alexander argues against several popular Great Filter explanations, emphasizing that the true Filter must be more consistent and thorough than common x-risks or alien interventions.
13 min read 1,909 words
SSC
Not Even A Real Links Post, Just A Link
Scott reflects on his hasty utopian science post, viewing it as a success for prompting Robin Hanson to expand on academic prediction markets.
1 min read 55 words
SSC
Hansonian Optimism
Scott Alexander uses a king-and-viziers analogy to argue that people can be inherently good even when their actions seem selfish, and explores the nature of evil and human goodness.
8 min read 1,224 words
SSC
Poor Folks Do Smile…For Now
Scott Alexander discusses Robin Hanson's vision of a future with emulated humans, debating the preservation of human values and the nature of future societal coordination.
16 min read 2,355 words
SSC
Investment and Inefficient Charity
Scott Alexander discusses Robin Hanson's idea of investing charitable donations for later use, exploring psychological resistance and attempting to debunk it with various arguments.
14 min read 2,063 words
LW
What Is Signaling, Really?
Scott defines signaling and explains how it works through examples ranging from college degrees to diamond necklaces, emphasizing both its necessity for conveying credible information and its potential for wasteful resource destruction.
13 min read 1,889 words
LW
To what degree do we have goals?
Scott argues against negotiating with unconscious desires, distinguishing between behavior-executors (which have context-dependent urges) and utility-maximizers (which have stable preferences), and suggests we mistakenly model ourselves as the latter when we're actually the former.
13 min read 1,971 words
LW
The Blue-Minimizing Robot
Scott uses a thought experiment about a robot that shoots blue things to argue that we mistakenly interpret simple programmed behaviors as goal-directed utility maximization, when really the robot is just executing code, not minimizing blue.
8 min read 1,108 words
LW
More thoughts on assertions
Scott analyzes when assertions should be trusted, showing that their evidentiary value depends on whether you already know the belief's distribution, the asserter's credentials, and how you encountered them, while claims of having 'evidence' mostly serve as signals of rationality rather than factual proof.
13 min read 1,958 words
LW
Survey Results
Scott analyzes results from a 166-person Less Wrong survey covering demographics, probability estimates on various topics, and philosophical positions, finding a highly educated, mostly male, atheist, politically libertarian/liberal community with surprisingly accurate collective knowledge but notable gaps between stated beliefs and actions.
15 min read 2,255 words
LW
Beware Trivial Inconveniences
Scott explores how small inconveniences can powerfully shape behavior, from China's Great Firewall to rebate forms to credit card spending, and discusses policy implications including opt-out government programs.
8 min read 1,094 words
LW
Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great
Scott argues that "extreme rationality" (x-rationality) - the formal study of rationality beyond normal intelligent thinking - provides much less practical benefit than the rationalist community believes, estimating a correlation of only 0.1 with success.
16 min read 2,477 words
LW
Simultaneously Right and Wrong
Scott uses self-handicapping studies to argue that people can hold a biased belief on the surface and an accurate one underneath, much like belief in belief.
7 min read 1,066 words