Robin Hanson

Last updated

Robin Hanson
Robin Hanson in a field 2.jpg
Hanson in 2011
Born
Robin Dale Hanson

(1959-08-28) August 28, 1959 (age 65)
Alma mater
OccupationEconomist
Organization(s) George Mason University
Future of Humanity Institute
Known for FutureMAP, LMSR, Foresight Institute
Notable work The Elephant in the Brain
The Age of Em

Robin Dale Hanson (born August 28, 1959 [1] ) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University [2] and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. [3] He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR (Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) [4] used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point (where Hanson is Chief Scientist [5] ), and has conducted research on signalling. He also proposed the Great Filter hypothesis.

Contents

Background

Hanson received a BS in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an MS in physics and an MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1984, and a PhD in social science from Caltech in 1997 for his thesis titled Four puzzles in information and politics: Product bans, informed voters, social insurance, and persistent disagreement. [6] Before getting his PhD he researched artificial intelligence, Bayesian statistics and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and elsewhere. In addition, he started the first internal corporate prediction market at Xanadu in 1990. [7]

He is married to Peggy Jackson, a hospice social worker, [8] and has two children. [9] He is the son of a Southern Baptist preacher. [10] Hanson has elected to have his brain cryonically preserved in the event of medical death. [8] He was involved early on in the creation of the Rationalist community through online weblogs. [11]

Views

Robin Hanson discussing alternative economic-legal systems at the 2019 Institute of Cryptoanarchy Conference Robin Hanson HCPP19.png
Robin Hanson discussing alternative economic-legal systems at the 2019 Institute of Cryptoanarchy Conference

Tyler Cowen's book Discover Your Inner Economist includes a fairly detailed discussion of Hanson's views:

Robin has strange ideas ... My other friend and colleague Bryan Caplan put it best: "When the typical economist tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'Eh, maybe.' Then I forget about it. When Robin Hanson tells me about his latest research, my standard reaction is 'No way! Impossible!' Then I think about it for years." [12]

Nate Silver, in his book The Signal and the Noise (2012), writes:

He is clearly not a man afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. Instead, Hanson writes a blog called Overcoming Bias, in which he presses readers to consider which cultural taboos, ideological beliefs, or misaligned incentives might constrain them from making optimal decisions. Hanson ... is an advocate of prediction markets – systems where you can place bets on a particular economic or policy outcome, like whether Israel will go to war with Iran, or how much global temperatures will rise because of climate change. His argument for these is pretty simple: They ensure that we have a financial stake in being accurate when we make forecasts, rather than just trying to look good to our peers. [13]

Hanson is credited with originating the concept of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), [9] a DARPA project to implement a market for betting on future developments in the Middle East. Hanson has expressed great disappointment in DARPA's cancellation of its related FutureMAP project, and he attributes this to the controversy surrounding the related Total Information Awareness program. He also created and supports a proposed system of government called futarchy, in which policies would be determined by prediction markets.[ citation needed ]

In a controversial 2018 blog post on the incel movement, Hanson appeared to agree with the incel movement's likening of the distribution of job opportunities to "access to sex". He wrote that he found it puzzling that similar concern had not been shown for incels as for low-income individuals. Some journalists, such as Alexandra Scaggs in the Financial Times , criticized Hanson for discussing sex as if it was a commodity. [14]

Hanson has been criticized for his writings relating to sexual relationships and women. "If you’ve ever heard of George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, there’s a good chance it was because he wrote something creepy", Slate columnist Jordan Weissman wrote in 2018. [15] In an article on bias against women in economics, Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith cited a blog post by Hanson comparing cuckoldry to "gentle silent rape", [16] lamenting that there was no retraction and no outcry from fellow economists. [17] In The New Yorker , Jia Tolentino described Hanson's blog post as a "flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment". [18]

Robin Hanson discussing prediction markets at the 2023 Manifold conference. Robin Hanson at Manifest 2023.jpg
Robin Hanson discussing prediction markets at the 2023 Manifold conference.

A 2003 article in Fortune examined Hanson's work, noting, among other things, that he is a proponent of cryonics and that his ideas have found some acceptance among extropians on the Internet. [19] He has since written extensively on the topic. Hanson also coined the term Great Filter, referring to whatever prevents "dead matter" from becoming an expanding and observable intelligent civilization. He was motivated to seek his doctorate so that his theories would reach a wider audience. [10]

Books

Hanson has written two books. The Age of Em (2016) [20] [21] concerns his views on brain emulation and its eventual impact on society. [22] The Elephant in the Brain (2018), coauthored with Kevin Simler, looks at mental blind spots of society and individuals. [23] [24]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George Mason University</span> Public university in Fairfax, Virginia, US

George Mason University (GMU) is a public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. Located in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., the university is named in honor of George Mason, a Founding Father of the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James M. Buchanan</span> American economist (1919–2013)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bryan Caplan</span> American behavioral economist and author (born 1971)

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The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists. Since PAM's closure, several private-sector variations on the idea have been launched.

Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of the contracts are considered as the aggregated belief.

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<i>The Age of Em</i> 2016 book by Robin Hanson

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<i>The Elephant in the Brain</i> 2018 book by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life is a 2018 nonfiction book by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson. Simler is a writer and software engineer, while Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. The book explores self-deception and hidden motives in human behaviour. The publisher's website describes the aim of the book as 'to track down the darker, unexamined corners of our psyches and blast them with floodlights'.

References

  1. ↑ Hanson, Robin (August 28, 2009). "Today I'm 50." Overcoming Bias.
  2. ↑ George Mason University, Department of Economics. "Full Time Faculty." http://economics.gmu.edu/people/full_time_faculty
  3. ↑ Robin Hanson: My best idea was prediction markets. Archived July 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  4. ↑ Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule
  5. ↑ Consensus Point. "About Us." http://www.consensuspoint.com/about/
  6. ↑ "Four puzzles in information and politics: Product bans, informed voters, social insurance, and persistent disagreement" . Retrieved April 13, 2014– via ProQuest.
  7. ↑ Hanson, Robin. "Robin Hanson's Bio" . Retrieved March 6, 2011.
  8. 1 2 Howley, Kerry (July 7, 2010). "Until Cryonics Do Us Part". The New York Times. Retrieved September 9, 2010.
  9. 1 2 Andrew Orlowski, Meet the ‘transhumanists’ behind the Pentagon terror casino, The Register, August 5, 2003 (accessed September 17, 2012)
  10. 1 2 Kahn, Jeremy (September 15, 2003). "The Man Who Would Have Us Bet On Terrorism – Not to Mention Discard Democracy and Cryogenically Freeze Our Heads – May Have a Point (About The Betting, We Mean)". Fortune. p. 179.
  11. ↑ Metz, Cade (February 13, 2021). "Silicon Valley's Safe Space". The New York Times. Retrieved April 30, 2021. Robin Hanson, a professor of economics at George Mason University who helped create the blogs that spawned the Rationalist movement.
  12. ↑ Cowen, Tyler (2007). Discover Your Inner Economist: Use incentives to fall in love, survive your next meeting, and motivate your dentist. New York, NY: Penguin Group (USA) Inc. pp.  93–94. ISBN   978-0-525-95025-7.
  13. ↑ Silver, Nate (2012). The Signal and the Noise. New York, NY: The Penguin Press. pp.  201–202. ISBN   978-1594204111.
  14. ↑ "Sex redistribution' and the means of reproduction". Financial Times. May 8, 2018. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022.
  15. ↑ Weissman, Jordan. "Is Robin Hanson America's Creepiest Economist?". Slate.
  16. ↑ Hanson, Robin. "Gentle Silent Rape".
  17. ↑ Smith, Noah. "Economics Is a Dismal Science for Women". Bloomberg Opinion.
  18. ↑ "The Rage of the Incels".
  19. ↑ "Overcoming Bias : Search Results : cryonics". www.overcomingbias.com. Retrieved May 11, 2020.
  20. ↑ Hanson, Robin (1 June 2016). The Age of Em: Work, love and life when robots rule the Earth. Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780198754626.
  21. ↑ "The Age of Em, a book" . Retrieved 8 June 2016.
  22. ↑ "Robin Hanson on "The Age of Em"". Future Thinkers. 5 July 2016.
  23. ↑ Hanson, Robin (February 2017). "The Elephant in the Brain". Overcoming Bias.
  24. ↑ "Biography". Robin D. Hanson. George Mason University.
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