From: Robin Hanson (rhanson@gmu.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 22 2003 - 08:35:22 MDT
On 7/22/2003, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>>Which raises some interesting questions -- Eliezer's or Robin's
>>hubris is justified, generally apparent and is an aspect of
>>their personalities that one includes in "who they are" (completely
>>justified IMO). But one has to wonder (at least I do) -- where
>>is Anders' hubris? Is it accumulating somewhere? Is it lurking,
>>waiting to spring out upon us? Should we all be glad he lives in
>>a country where it is dark much of the year -- or should we be
>>really worried.
>
>*Robin's* hubris?
>
>Is this a typo, or do you really mean Robin Hanson?
>
>I can understand why people accuse me of hubris, but Robin? Robin is
>obviously restraining, discounting, and understating his estimation of his
>own abilities, to the point where it's clear that he does in fact possess
>more intelligence than he is willing to publicly attribute to himself. And
>he's done that so carefully that I can't even tell what his real
>estimation of his own intelligence is. (As for his real intelligence, of
>course, I can't tell that either - not by looking at the portion of his
>ideas that he's selected as being possible to explain.) In short, Robin
>is playing exactly by the social modesty rules. Is the "hubris" part that
>he is visibly doing just that, playing, or does he actually somehow manage
>to sound hubristic? If Robin manages to come across as arrogant, I'll
>probably just give up on the whole issue.
By the standards of most people, I have to be way way into the upper tail
of the distribution of hubris. I propose radical new forms of governance
and social organizations, I propose radical theories of common social
behaviors, I claim we know some things about distant future technologies
such as uploads and their social implications, I endorse relatively
straightforward consequential ethics when most people would retreat into
deontology, and I am a cryonics customer. If that isn't hubris, I'm not
sure what is.
I do agonize about the fact that all else equal being that far out into the
high hubris tail strongly suggests that I'm mistaken in my hubris. But in
the end, this agonizing doesn't seem to change my views very much, besides
adding a few more qualifiers now and then, so it's not clear that I really
take it that seriously. Maybe you'll give me anti-hubris points for
stating this publicly, but I'm not sure you should.
Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
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