_This is a very early draft of a [[People]] profile for [[=Robin Hanson]]. I'm not linking to it from the [[People]] page for now, because it's really not very good yet._ > The future is not the realization of our hopes and dreams, a warning to mend our ways, an adventure to inspire us, nor a romance to touch our hearts. The future is just another place in space-time. Its residents, like us, find their world mundane and morally ambiguous. > > […] > > New habits and attitudes result less than you think from moral progress, and more from people adapting to new situations. So many of your descendants’ strange habits and attitudes are likely to violate your concepts of moral progress; what they do may often seem wrong. Also, you likely won’t be able to easily categorize many future ways as either good or evil; they will instead just seem weird. After all, your world hardly fits the morality tales your distant ancestors told; to them you’d just seem weird. Complex realities frustrate simple summaries, and don’t fit simple morality tales. > > -- The Age of Em: Introduction Robin Hanson is a serious futurist—an academic trying to make accurate predictions, not a storyteller satisfying demands for entertainment. He takes the implications of economics and evolutionary theory very seriously. In particular, he insists that in the long run, competition will have the final word. We currently underrate this important truth because we live in a "[dream time](https://sun.pjh.is/robin-hanson-this-is-the-dream-time)" of rapid growth, where the normal Malthusian pressures have become unusually—but temporarily—relaxed. Hanson's focus on evolution, [[Naturalism]] and [[Pragmatism]] motivate a skeptical view of the stories humans tell about themselves and their behaviour. He complains, in particular, that most moral philosphers are simply not making enough effort to be realistic and honest about the world we find ourselves in. This is a concern he shares with [[=Nietzsche]]. In the short run, individuals and groups can get away with a wide array of "luxury" beliefs and behaviours, which do not maximise the number of descendants. But in the long run, some groups will happen upon a belief-behaviour package which creates more descendants than others, and this will come to dominate. Competition and selection pressures constrain the menu of belief-behaviour packages that can be sustained over the longer run. From the perspective of any particular cultural moment, evolutionary dynamics can seem like a grave threat—gradually eroding our current way of life and replacing it with something quite alien. There is thus a temptation to resist these dynamics by supressing competition. Supressing competition with sufficient reliability involves difficult coordination problems. But it can be done sometimes, partcularly at more local levels, and it does serve as a way to "buy time" for a particular way of life. The costs, however, are significant: coordination risks collective suicide, and suppressing local competition dynamics may leave you less able to face challenges from external competitiors you cannot suppress (e.g. rival civilisations, aliens). This question of how much to expose our current way of life to competition and revision looms in the background all over the place. On average, a competition-maximising approach may [^1] increase the chances your lineage will survive over the long-run, but it reduces their similarity to you, perhaps to the point where you no longer care about them, or even to the point where you are horrified by them. And there will be particular areas where unrestricted competition increases existential risk. [^1] Vulnerable-world type worries might push against this. Some of Robin's ideas that I keep coming back to: - [One of our main choices is between competition and governance](https://sun.pjh.is/robin-hanson-one-of-our-main-choices-is-between-competition-and-governance) - [World government risks collective suicide](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/11/world-government-risks-collective-suicide.html) - [This is the dreamtime](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/this-is-the-dream-time.html) - [Long reflection is a crazy bad idea](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/10/long-reflection-is-crazy-bad-idea.html) Where to start: - [Robin's blog](https://overcomingbias.com/) - [On evolved values](https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/12/on-evolved-values.html) - [Writing on fertility](https://www.overcomingbias.com/?s=fertility)