Robin Hanson - The Long View and The Elephant in the Brain

Okay. Robin Hanson needs no introduction, so let's begin. So you've written a few essays on, uh, the long view, how there's no segident player... significant players that are optimizing for it. But isn't the most obvious explanation for that, that, uh, optimizing for the long term is ineffectual given how unpredictable the future is, or even counterproductive, given, uh, that you might be ignoring present circumstances?

Well, uh, if it's unpredictable, then optimizing should take that into account. (laughs)

Mm-hmm.

But it does look like people are deviating from what they would do optimally trying to take the long term into account, uh, and taking into account the actual amount of uncertainty. Um, th- that seems... So for example, there's something called discount rates in economics, uh, and interest rates, and so, uh, if you have the long view, you would take a, a very low discount rate. That is, you would think the future was just as important. Although with uncertainty, that might make it hard to make some of the choices. But for example, resources are just generally useful, so if you just invested in collecting resources, you don't have to know exactly what's going to happen in the future to know that resources are gonna be pretty useful, wh- whatever happens. And so if you are discounting your future and not being interested in collecting resources, that's a pretty in- clear indication that you're not so interested in the long term future-

Hmm.

... uh, relative to other people who might.

Hmm. But, um, if it's true that, like, uh, thinking about the long term future is useful, then wouldn't you expect the most powerful institutions today to be the ones that ta- thought about the long term future in the past?

Well, that's, uh, part of the question I raise in my discussions of it. So you might think that in the very long run there would be selection for thinking more about the long term future because that would win. If we look, uh, at biology, uh, we can think that there's been a very strong, um, competition in biology for influencing the future. And in some sense, that is what evolution is about. (laughs) Species and individuals compete to influence the future, like having more descendants is the main way that biology influences the future. Now, uh, animals sometimes make plans and, uh, you as a human might make a plan to save up resources and pass them on to your kids, and we know that, uh, that sort of planning has a discount rate that goes with it because your kids only share half your genes. So your gene, individual genes, they can't save resources for themselves. (laughs) They can only save resources for this whole creature that you are, which is a bundle of genes, and this whole creature that you are, when it passes on and has descendants, those descendants only have half as many genes. And so that means that, uh, your genes have a, you know, choice between, you know, doing things that promote the genes right now (laughs) versus doing things that collect resources and have a 50/50 chance (laughs) of promoting that gene later on because its descendants now only have a 50% chance of, of sharing that gene. So that produces a discount factor of once every generation, a factor of two, and that's in the ballpark of what actual human discount rates are. And so that is a plausible explanation for human discount rates, is that, uh, we evolved in this context where, uh, when we had a choice to save resources in order to pass it on to the next generation, uh, the next generation only shares half our genes. So, see, the challenge is to come up with a unit of selection that can pass on resources to itself over the long run.