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I was privileged to receive a reply from Robin Hanson on my critique of his largely excellent book The Elephant in the Brain with co-author Kevin Simler. I think in several cases he rebutted something other than what I argued, but I encourage you to read it and judge for yourself.

Given the high-profile book reviews that are probably forthcoming from places like the Wall Street Journal, I thank Robin for taking the time to engage with the little guys!

Replies

I’ll follow Robin’s lead and switch to first names.

Some say we should have been more academic and detailed, while other say we should have been more accessible and less detailed….Count Jess as someone who wanted a longer book.

It’s true that I’d have preferred a longer book with more details, but I think I gestured at ways Kevin and Robin could hold length constant while increasing convincingness. And there are ways of keeping the book accessible while augmenting the rigor (e.g., endnotes), although of course they are more work.

Yes for each motive one can distinguish both a degree of consciousness and also a degree of current vs past adaptation. But these topics were not essential for our main thesis, making credible claims on them takes a lot more evidence and argument, and we already had trouble with trying to cover too much material for one book.

I was mostly happy with how the authors handled the degree of consciousness. However, I think the current- vs past-adaptation distinction is very important for designing institutions, which Kevin and Robin correctly list as one of the main applications of the book’s material. For instance, should the arXiv host comments on papers, and how should they be implemented to avoid pissing contests?… [continue reading]

Drawing on a large academic literature in topics like sociology, behavioral economics, anthropology, and psychology, and especially the (generalized) theory of signalling, Robin Hanson has assembled a large toolbox for systemically understanding hypocrisy, i.e., the ways in which people’s actions systematically and selfishly deviate from their verbalized explanations. Although he would be the first to admit that many of these ideas have been discovered and rediscovered repeatedly over centuries (or millennia) with varying degrees of clarity, and although there is much I am not convinced by, I find the general framework deeply insightful, and his presentation to be more clear, analytical, and descriptive (rather than disruptively normative) than other accounts. Most of this I have gathered from his renowned blogging at Overcoming Bias, but I have always wished for a more concise (and high status!) form factor that I could point others to. At long last, Hanson and his co-author Kevin Simler have written a nice book that largely satisfies me: The Elephant in the Brain (Amazon). I highly recommend it.

The reason I title these sorts of blog posts “Comments on…” is so I can present some disorganized responses to a work without feeling like I need to build a coherent thesis or pass overall judgment. I do not summarize the book below, so this post will mostly be useful for people who have read it. (You might think of this as a one-sided book club discussion rather than a book review.) But since I will naturally tend to focus on the places where I disagree with the authors, let me emphasize: the basic ideas of this book strike me as profound and probably mostly true.… [continue reading]