Robin Hanson

Robin Dale Hanson (born August 28, 1959 ) is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. 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) used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point (where Hanson is Chief Scientist ), and has conducted research on signalling. He also proposed the Great Filter hypothesis.

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. 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.

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

Views


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.'"

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."

Hanson is credited with originating the concept of the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), 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.

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.

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. 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", lamenting that there was no retraction and no outcry from fellow economists. In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino described Hanson's blog post as a "flippantly dehumanizing thought experiment". 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. 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.

Books
Hanson has written two books.

The Age of Em (2016) concerns his views on brain emulation and its eventual impact on society.

The Elephant in the Brain (2018), coauthored with Kevin Simler, looks at mental blind spots of society and individuals.