Robin Hanson
American · b. 1959
Robin Hanson is an American economist and social scientist at George Mason University, known for applying economics and evolutionary psychology to human behaviour. His work on signaling — the idea that much of human activity is better explained by the desire to signal hidden qualities than by stated motives — is collected in The Elephant in the Brain (2018), co-authored with Kevin Simler. He blogs at Overcoming Bias and has written extensively on prediction markets, medicine, and the far future, including a book-length sketch of an emulation-economy scenario in The Age of Em (2016).
Episodes
- 60. Was the sexual revolution a mistake? (Houellebecq's Atomised, part 1)
- 20. Albert Camus' The Fall: Signalling, scrupulosity, and pathological self-awareness
- 19. Philip K. Dick's paranoid classic Ubik: Fluttering at the windowpane of reality
- 17. Frankenstein, part 2: Nature vs nurture
- 6. Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, part 1: Skill issue
- 3. Michel Houellebecq's Map and the Territory, part 3: The world is weary of me and I am weary of it
Fleeting mentions
- 49. C.P. Snow's The Two Cultures: the original stemcels vs shape rotators beef
- 39. Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed: Real anarchy has never been tried
- 30. Banned books: Vladimir Nabokov's infamous Lolita
- 1. Michel Houellebecq's Map and the Territory, part 1: Memeing big fat juicy asses into reality