All of RobinHanson's Comments + Replies

We have lots of models that are useful even when the conclusions follow pretty directly. Such as supply and demand. The question is whether such models are useful, not if they are simple.

The agency literature is there to model real agency relations in the world. Those real relations no doubt contain plenty of "unawareness". If models without unawareness were failing to capture and explain a big fraction of real agency problems, there would be plenty of scope for people to try to fill that gap via models that include it. The claim that this couldn't work because such models are limited seems just arbitrary and wrong to me. So either one must claim that AI-related unawareness is of a very different type or scale from ordinary... (read more)

5apc
The economists I spoke to seemed to think that in agency unawareness models conclusions follow pretty immediately from the assumptions and so don't teach you much. It's not that they can't model real agency problems, just that you don't learn much from the model. Perhaps if we'd spoken to more economists there would have been more disagreement on this point.

Are you sure "rationalist" is a good label here? It suggests the claim that you are rational, or at least more rational than most. "Rational" has so many associations that go beyond truth-seeking.

We need some kind of word that means "seeker after less wrongness", and refers pragmatically to a group of people who go around discussing epistemic hygiene and actually worrying about how to think and whether their beliefs are correct. I know of no shorter and clearer alternative than "rationalist". There are some words I'm willing to try to rescue, and this is one of them.