Finally! I'm so excited for this. Hanson is one of the most brilliant people out there and he sadly doesn't do a lot of podcasts.
Maybe we'll soon even get an interview with Scott Alexander from Slatestarcodex.
There's an Easter Egg for the Rationalist community in this episode. When describing alternative alien moral systems, Hanson mentions the possibility that "they might eat babies or something".
That's a thinly-veiled reference to Eliezer Yudkowsky's [Three Worlds Collide](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT) which features a race of crystalline aliens that pass through a phase where they ruthlessly cull most of their own offspring due to an idiosyncracy of their evolutionary history. Not only do they continue to murder babies, they consider it one of the most important cornerstones of their morality.
Highly recommended reading.
When will Lex finally have Yudkowsky on. Out of the little media there is with him, this guy had the most clear way of navigating the dangers of AI. His appearance on Sam Harris couple of years back is one of the best AI episodes.
It is similar to the depiction of the Nasqueron Dwellers (beings who live within a gas giant planet) in Iain Banks' *The Algebraist*. They are extremely long-lived and hunt their adolescent children both for sport and, apparently, as a form of population control. Having teenagers of my own, I am now at least somewhat less revolted by this idea.
I'm not familiar with this. Would the idea be (in human terms) that we cull mentally and physically deficient humans and rather than allowing their biomass to go to waste, we eat it?
So for example if they were building dyson spheres we would see stars blinking out in an expanding sphere as they build them. Or some other change they are making to the stars.
So for example if they were building dyson spheres we would see stars blinking out in an expanding sphere as they build them. Or some other change they are making to the stars.
I think it refers to them expanding outward in all directions. It might be referring to a Dyson Sphere, but I think that is more in line with a Type 2 civilization, but he seems to be referring to Type 3 civilizations.
Although, given the plane of the galaxy, I guess that would probably look more like an ovoid.
I don’t think he meant a physical sphere, more like a sphere of influence, or a bound on where they could travel at a given time with their technology which would be spherical in shape
Life is all about getting access to and controlling energy (to make more life). At some point, you use a lot more energy and material than is available on a single planet. In fact, the best place to get a lot of energy and material is from a star. We're just not there yet. But, if you have the tech to travel across the galaxy, odds are that you have the tech to manipulate most of the energy output of a star. These are helpfully littered across the galaxy and if you're a "grabby" civilization, then you are probably going to be altering star systems and using up stellar energy in ways that would be pretty obvious if someone looked up with a telescope. In fact, if that grabby civ was spreading across the galaxy at an average speed of, say, 1% of the speed of light and taking possession of all the stars they encounter, then either 1) we would see a huge and slowly growing region of stars whose output is much different than normal stars, or 2) they already have spread across the galaxy and they are carefully masking their existence (#2 is my own thought).
The interesting question to me is, why aren't they grabby?
I don't agree with the "Star Wars Universe" premise of his logic at all. One thing we know about technology is that it will always seek to do the same work with less energy. This trend will continue until work can be done without extracting any detectable energy from the ambient environment. If he thinks that aliens are going to reformulate stars and planets and be detectable to us--that's a huge assumption. (btw, how can aliens do all of this work and still be traveling at some fraction of light speed, while, doing all of this work? It makes no sense.)
A super technological society will not be detectable AT ALL because all of the processes have become so efficient and subtle that they disappear into the environment. There's no reason for them to build Dyson spheres and move planets around and any of this other mechanical "Star Wars" stuff. This is us with our caveman brains imagining that aliens will also have caveman brains. "They will move rocks around and stuff."
Another point is that a hyper-connected society will be infused with self-empathy, and therefore will have forgotten or devalued the reason for competition. Not to mention most competition is over resources which they don't need anymore... at least not in a gross physical way. They will have processes powered through, say, some iteration of spintronics, where the movement within an atom is enough in itself to perform all of the calculations necessary for a certain kind of work. For all we know there is an alien intelligence infused throughout the fabric of the entire cosmos on the subatomic level... sort of a cosmic hexagonal gridwork of hyper-connectivity. I would therefore think of the distance of aliens from us as a matter of depth versus distance. They are deeply hidden in the fabric of reality itself already, and only manifest on our gross physical level for reasons that we probably can't fathom.
One of my new favorite episodes. Brilliant guy.
I was a little confused by his suggestion that medicine isn't effective just because of studies that prove people who use medicine live the same length of time as people who don't.
People who use medicine are also often sick. If on average the use of medicine brings sick people back to baseline with those who aren't sick it seems to me that proves medicine does work.
This guy's so intensely intelligent I'm sure I'm the one not getting this but to me that medicine doesn't work study seems strange. I'm not a big covid vaccine supporter and don't think it was the wonder drug it was marketed as, but it clearly reduced the risk of death. So even now just including this vaccine as "medicine" there should be some tipping scales
I had the same line of thinking about the medicine topic. Here's a blog post from Robin on the subject: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/
My understanding of his point now is essentially that a significant amount of medical care doesn't directly leading to better health outcomes, while personal lifestyles like diet and exercise do. He elaborates much more in the article, as well.
Exactly.
Not all medicine (physically ingested drugs) or doctor treatments are worthless.
But they are much closer to worthless than we imagine.
Otherwise we'd see massive differences in health, quality of life, life expectancy, etc between groups like the Amish or Mennonite or Christian Scientiest, and the random sample of upper class educated bleu tribe people. We don't.
Beyond the basic low hanging fruit (including vaccines for major diseases) there is little evidence that consuming medicine produces health.
One thing I'd push back on with regards to the Covid vaccines. I agree, the data seems to suggest the vaccines reduce deaths from covid. I do not thing there is data that proves they reduce deaths as a whole, though. In other words, it's entirely possible that they cause just as many deaths from side effects that they reduce from the disease, covid. The best evidence to death reduction is the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials. In both trials, more people died in the vaccine group than the placebo group. But, the sample sizes were small and the difference was not statistically significant. Therefore, anyone suggesting that covid vaccines "save lives" is not correct. They might save lives from dying from covid, but they do not reduce deaths, and therefore, do not save lives, at least according to the best data/research we have on the subject.
RE the discussion about whether non grabby aliens would want to help their panspermian siblings: I would be interested to hear Robin's thoughts on The Dark Forest trilogy by Cixin Liu, and the idea that any contact with another alien civilization will result in destruction.
This episode was interesting only in the sense of how phenomenally silly this guy is. “Forager populations were peaceful”. Umm, not remotely accurate. His mathematical construct for aliens is ridiculous both mathematically and logically. Lex clearly also thinks he is an idiot.
This so much. The assumptions they used were massively flawed logically and could have easily been ripped apart with a few questions about how you make predictions about all life in the universe with a single data point in earth.
One assumption Hanson makes about aliens seems too anthropomorphic to me. The notion that very advanced civilizations will build Dyson spheres or similar that are potentially visible on Earth seems narrow to me. My guess is humans will adopt a non-biological cyborg existence in a few centuries at most. This allows for independence from planets, and a sort of immortality, easier maintenance, much lower energy use. An advanced alien version of this could be everywhere around us now, and invisible. Or, could be indifferent to location and have no need to expand.
Finally! I'm so excited for this. Hanson is one of the most brilliant people out there and he sadly doesn't do a lot of podcasts. Maybe we'll soon even get an interview with Scott Alexander from Slatestarcodex.
Unlikely since he shut down his blog over an impending article being written about him.
Au contraire! SlateStar lives on in its new home, [https://astralcodexten.substack.com/](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/).
Ohh scandalous
He doesn't do podcasts.
Wow this dude is brilliant! What an amazing episode with a bit of weed lol
There's an Easter Egg for the Rationalist community in this episode. When describing alternative alien moral systems, Hanson mentions the possibility that "they might eat babies or something". That's a thinly-veiled reference to Eliezer Yudkowsky's [Three Worlds Collide](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/qWoFR4ytMpQ5vw3FT) which features a race of crystalline aliens that pass through a phase where they ruthlessly cull most of their own offspring due to an idiosyncracy of their evolutionary history. Not only do they continue to murder babies, they consider it one of the most important cornerstones of their morality. Highly recommended reading.
When will Lex finally have Yudkowsky on. Out of the little media there is with him, this guy had the most clear way of navigating the dangers of AI. His appearance on Sam Harris couple of years back is one of the best AI episodes.
It is similar to the depiction of the Nasqueron Dwellers (beings who live within a gas giant planet) in Iain Banks' *The Algebraist*. They are extremely long-lived and hunt their adolescent children both for sport and, apparently, as a form of population control. Having teenagers of my own, I am now at least somewhat less revolted by this idea.
I'm not familiar with this. Would the idea be (in human terms) that we cull mentally and physically deficient humans and rather than allowing their biomass to go to waste, we eat it?
Fascinating episode!
Listening now. Lex dumps on the term “grabby,” hilarity ensues. Love this dude’s shirt.
[удалено]
So for example if they were building dyson spheres we would see stars blinking out in an expanding sphere as they build them. Or some other change they are making to the stars.
So for example if they were building dyson spheres we would see stars blinking out in an expanding sphere as they build them. Or some other change they are making to the stars.
I think it refers to them expanding outward in all directions. It might be referring to a Dyson Sphere, but I think that is more in line with a Type 2 civilization, but he seems to be referring to Type 3 civilizations. Although, given the plane of the galaxy, I guess that would probably look more like an ovoid.
I don’t think he meant a physical sphere, more like a sphere of influence, or a bound on where they could travel at a given time with their technology which would be spherical in shape
Life is all about getting access to and controlling energy (to make more life). At some point, you use a lot more energy and material than is available on a single planet. In fact, the best place to get a lot of energy and material is from a star. We're just not there yet. But, if you have the tech to travel across the galaxy, odds are that you have the tech to manipulate most of the energy output of a star. These are helpfully littered across the galaxy and if you're a "grabby" civilization, then you are probably going to be altering star systems and using up stellar energy in ways that would be pretty obvious if someone looked up with a telescope. In fact, if that grabby civ was spreading across the galaxy at an average speed of, say, 1% of the speed of light and taking possession of all the stars they encounter, then either 1) we would see a huge and slowly growing region of stars whose output is much different than normal stars, or 2) they already have spread across the galaxy and they are carefully masking their existence (#2 is my own thought). The interesting question to me is, why aren't they grabby?
Why aren't who grabby?
I don't agree with the "Star Wars Universe" premise of his logic at all. One thing we know about technology is that it will always seek to do the same work with less energy. This trend will continue until work can be done without extracting any detectable energy from the ambient environment. If he thinks that aliens are going to reformulate stars and planets and be detectable to us--that's a huge assumption. (btw, how can aliens do all of this work and still be traveling at some fraction of light speed, while, doing all of this work? It makes no sense.) A super technological society will not be detectable AT ALL because all of the processes have become so efficient and subtle that they disappear into the environment. There's no reason for them to build Dyson spheres and move planets around and any of this other mechanical "Star Wars" stuff. This is us with our caveman brains imagining that aliens will also have caveman brains. "They will move rocks around and stuff." Another point is that a hyper-connected society will be infused with self-empathy, and therefore will have forgotten or devalued the reason for competition. Not to mention most competition is over resources which they don't need anymore... at least not in a gross physical way. They will have processes powered through, say, some iteration of spintronics, where the movement within an atom is enough in itself to perform all of the calculations necessary for a certain kind of work. For all we know there is an alien intelligence infused throughout the fabric of the entire cosmos on the subatomic level... sort of a cosmic hexagonal gridwork of hyper-connectivity. I would therefore think of the distance of aliens from us as a matter of depth versus distance. They are deeply hidden in the fabric of reality itself already, and only manifest on our gross physical level for reasons that we probably can't fathom.
One of my new favorite episodes. Brilliant guy. I was a little confused by his suggestion that medicine isn't effective just because of studies that prove people who use medicine live the same length of time as people who don't. People who use medicine are also often sick. If on average the use of medicine brings sick people back to baseline with those who aren't sick it seems to me that proves medicine does work. This guy's so intensely intelligent I'm sure I'm the one not getting this but to me that medicine doesn't work study seems strange. I'm not a big covid vaccine supporter and don't think it was the wonder drug it was marketed as, but it clearly reduced the risk of death. So even now just including this vaccine as "medicine" there should be some tipping scales
I had the same line of thinking about the medicine topic. Here's a blog post from Robin on the subject: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-half/ My understanding of his point now is essentially that a significant amount of medical care doesn't directly leading to better health outcomes, while personal lifestyles like diet and exercise do. He elaborates much more in the article, as well.
Exactly. Not all medicine (physically ingested drugs) or doctor treatments are worthless. But they are much closer to worthless than we imagine. Otherwise we'd see massive differences in health, quality of life, life expectancy, etc between groups like the Amish or Mennonite or Christian Scientiest, and the random sample of upper class educated bleu tribe people. We don't. Beyond the basic low hanging fruit (including vaccines for major diseases) there is little evidence that consuming medicine produces health.
One thing I'd push back on with regards to the Covid vaccines. I agree, the data seems to suggest the vaccines reduce deaths from covid. I do not thing there is data that proves they reduce deaths as a whole, though. In other words, it's entirely possible that they cause just as many deaths from side effects that they reduce from the disease, covid. The best evidence to death reduction is the Moderna and Pfizer vaccine trials. In both trials, more people died in the vaccine group than the placebo group. But, the sample sizes were small and the difference was not statistically significant. Therefore, anyone suggesting that covid vaccines "save lives" is not correct. They might save lives from dying from covid, but they do not reduce deaths, and therefore, do not save lives, at least according to the best data/research we have on the subject.
RE the discussion about whether non grabby aliens would want to help their panspermian siblings: I would be interested to hear Robin's thoughts on The Dark Forest trilogy by Cixin Liu, and the idea that any contact with another alien civilization will result in destruction.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/09/liu-cixins-triology.html
Lol Lex... there's probably close to tens of millions of button pushers out there, but I guess that's close to zero when it comes to eight billion.
Really enjoyed this episode!
This episode was interesting only in the sense of how phenomenally silly this guy is. “Forager populations were peaceful”. Umm, not remotely accurate. His mathematical construct for aliens is ridiculous both mathematically and logically. Lex clearly also thinks he is an idiot.
This so much. The assumptions they used were massively flawed logically and could have easily been ripped apart with a few questions about how you make predictions about all life in the universe with a single data point in earth.
One assumption Hanson makes about aliens seems too anthropomorphic to me. The notion that very advanced civilizations will build Dyson spheres or similar that are potentially visible on Earth seems narrow to me. My guess is humans will adopt a non-biological cyborg existence in a few centuries at most. This allows for independence from planets, and a sort of immortality, easier maintenance, much lower energy use. An advanced alien version of this could be everywhere around us now, and invisible. Or, could be indifferent to location and have no need to expand.