'Rational Culture Choice' as an example of worlding
I read Overcoming Bias by Robin Hanson quite often because of that word ‘bias’ in the title. I like to keep up-to-date like a potato.
I find choices very interesting as a topic to discuss, because of bias, regardless of being overcome or indulged. Power corrupts by indulging our biases: 'use your anger Luke'.
So overcoming in the title is both problematic and healthy, (and I’ll save my compositional antics where I’ll jitter on about bias and me for another day).
A recent post at Overcoming Bias is Rational Culture Choice, a play on Rational Choice Theories.
The elephant in the room here is that culture rarely appears rational. Especially when people go jingoistic in moments of insecurity and disaster. Rational culture overcoming bias, or at least generating an intersubjective consensus that works practically… surely that is a good thing… right… —that is what I call worlding BTW.
My response to reading it, I hope, is not to tear it apart in anyway. I don’t seek to analyse its constituents while hoping to find a incoherent mess, nor even a singular contradiction on its own terms that undoes its best efforts. Neither wiil I laud this particular attempt at some sort of interdisciplinary project at the intersection of Standard Choice Theory and kulcha.
I immediately thought of the cultural materialism of Marvin Harris for some reason, that we were heading towards some non-marxist variety… anyway—that and a Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism comparison can be set aside as a side quest for later too.
Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and was research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University until that closed in 2024. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master's degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA. Professor Hanson has 5981 citations, a citation h-index of 35, and over ninety academic publications, including in Algorithmica, Applied Optics, Astrophysical Journal, Communications of the ACM, Economics Letters, Economica, Econometrica, Economics of Governance, Foundations of Physics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, Innovations, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Journal of Law Economics and Policy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Prediction Markets, Journal of Public Economics, Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, Medical Hypotheses, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Public Choice, Science, Social Epistemology, Social Philosophy and Policy, and Theory and Decision. Oxford University Press published his book The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth in June 2016, and his book The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life, co-authored with Kevin Simler, in January, 2018. Professor Hanson has 1100 media mentions, given 400 invited talks, and his blog OvercomingBias.com has had eight million visits. Professor Hanson has pioneered prediction markets, also known as information markets and idea futures, since 1988. He was the first to write in detail about creating and subsidizing markets to gain better estimates on a wide variety of important topics. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the first web markets, the Foresight Exchange since 1994, of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003, and of IARPA's combinatorial markets DAGGRE and SCICAST from 2010 to 2015. Professor Hanson developed new technologies for conditional, combinatorial, and intermediated trading, and studied insider trading, manipulation, and other foul play. He has written and spoken widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy, and has advised many ventures. He suggests "futarchy", a form of governance based on prediction markets. Robin has diverse research interests, with papers on spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonization. He coined the phrase "The Great Filter", numerically estimated it via a model of "Grabby Aliens", and has many million view videos, mostly on this topic (7.9M, 1.6M, 0.4M, 0.9M, 1.5M). Recently, he developed a theory of the sacred, wrote on AI risk, and focused on the world fertlity fall and cultural drift as its underlyhing cause. See more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hanson.
from : https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/bio.html
By quoting in full this resumé I want to highlight that Robin Hanson is very successfully worlding a life, a career is a type of worlding which individualises effort and creativity.
Robin Hanson has not overcome that bias – to live, to world. This is not a criticism, it is an example of what I am saying about worlding. Not overcoming it does not make Robin Hanson wrong and something-else-I-like right.
Worlding is the compositional bias we live with to create the body's fit. In a social animals it means we should on each other a lot. Old recidivist primate dominance games are one of the targets we are slowly shoulding away.
You’ll notice now I’ve may be been a meta-hypocritic above, saying I would not point out the 'hypocrisy' of having a career which is built by having a bias in the first place (the compositional swerve of life on country --- the big bias) and then calling a blog Overcoming Bias. My defense is that I did not analyse the contents to do this, nor the career, and then find inconsistencies in the tiny bits and pieces of thought presented. And presenting them as sins. I am not a narcissist denigrating others in order to bolster my self-percieved position. That is bad worlding, and we are in this together. This incoherence is one of belonging along with.
I am sure that Robin Hanson is well aware that without bias we would be dead, or at least, never alive in the fist place.
As such, the example here in Robin Hanson's post, is an object lesson in that many attempts to explain end… up… —creating.
This is not a criticism, at least not in general terms. This lesson holds regardlesss of the attempts being successful or not, on their own terms or others.
Robin Hanson is someone who very definitely creates as he analyses and researches.
I guess when it comes to culture it is biases all the way down.
Culture is made of nothing else, even when we overcome them, or attempt it even while knowing it is likely futile.
This is in part because culture is an outcome, and even as it operates as a meme machine or vector. (Good luck with that Rational Culture Choice thang.)
(In these discussions should measure culture by the amount of memory it works with: generates, uses, maintains, like energy measured on the Kardashev scale for ‘civilisations’).
Outcomes are not best discussed as the origins of something. Culture is but one of these nexus-like ‘problems’ where we worry about where they come from (the orginary bias is strong in this one). The others includes those things that culture (both the topic to discuss and the items covered by the discussion) blurs into:
morality/art/religion/polity/landscape/practice/beliefs/choices/mistakes/accidental-wins
and
wry smiles
also at substack.com for commenting at least