Robin Hanson > Quotes

“We feel a deep pleasure from realizing that we believe something in common with our friends, and different from most people. We feel an even deeper pleasure letting everyone know of this fact. This feeling is EVIL. Learn to see it in yourself, and then learn to be horrified by how thoroughly it can poison your mind. Yes evidence may at times force you to disagree with a majority, and your friends may have correlated exposure to that evidence, but take no pleasure when you and your associates disagree with others; that is the road to rationality ruin.”
― Robin Hanson

“You are more defined by the topics on which you argue, and the communities in which you argue, than by which side you take on those topics.”
― Robin Hanson

“Humans who attend directly to vivid cases [of inequality] are capable of great empathy with inequality losers. They are also capable of great compassion and even a desire to help. However, we humans are also quite capable of avoiding contact and exposure that might produce such compassion, and of numbing ourselves to the plight of losers about whom it would be inconvenient to feel empathy. So rich people avoid visiting poor neighborhoods and nations, attractive people avoid socializing with the ugly, and pretty young women become numb to the losses of the men they reject.”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

“The future is just another place in space-time. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and morally ambiguous.”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

“To counter all these biases, both in my readers, and in myself, I try to move my estimates in the following directions. I try to be less confident, to expect typical outcomes to be more ordinary, but also to expect more deviations from typical outcomes. I try to rely more on ordinary methods, sources, and assumptions, and also more on statistics or related systems and events.

I expect bigger deviations from traditional images of the future, but also rely less on strange, exotic, unlikely-seeming, and hypothetical possibilities. Looking backward, future folk should see their world as changing less from their past than we might see looking forward. Seen up close and honestly, I expect the future usually to look like most places: mundane, uninspiring, and morally ambiguous, with grand hopes and justifications often masking lives of quiet desperation. Of course, lives of quiet desperation can still be worth living.”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

“Statistics about other copies of a team make it harder for team members to deceive themselves about their past performance or their chances for future performance. Such ems may become more like chess players today, where objective performance measures (i.e., their rating) force them to accept their current performance and abilities. This tends to make such players less happy, as they can't pretend to be better than they are. If this happiness effect reduced em productivity sufficiently, ems may adopt attitudes such as "never tell me the odds", often avoiding information about their relative chances of future success.”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth

“least a trillion times as much to run. Regarding the”
― Robin Hanson, The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth

“Today, we often form romantic and other attachments that are specific to one individual, and which do not extend to other similar people.”
― Robin Hanson

“Well, just like infinity, you can’t know until forever, which is never, right? So, the better choice is at each moment, do you want to keep going? I would like to have the option at each moment to keep going.”
― Robin Hanson