meditated before, what surprised me most was not just the actual
sensations, but realizing that such extraordinary states had been locked
away in my mind this whole time. Their existence demonstrates that
attention, when summoned to its ful…remain invisible to the perceiver, because noticing them would present a challenge to how they see themselves.
Hanson and Simler emphasize that this behavior is universal, and having such base desires doesn’t make you a bad person. They ev…This task was an antimemetic albatross – seen and forgotten once a week – that I shuffled dutifully across my calendar. I knew it was important to write a contingency plan in case the worst happened. Though the scenario was unlikely, the co…
Robin Hanson
economist · 5 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Robin Hanson is an economist and futurist known for his work on signaling theory and hidden motives in human behavior, particularly through his book *The Elephant in the Brain* (co-authored with Kevin Simler). The course readings invoke Hanson's framework for understanding how humans obscure their true motivations from themselves and others—how social and evolutionary pressures create "invisible" desires that shape behavior without conscious awareness. His work appears here as a tool for analyzing the often-concealed drives operating beneath technological development, AI systems, and our collective blindness to our own irrationality in navigating advanced civilization scenarios.
Mentioned in 2 readings
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealth…[^14]: See e.g. Drexler (1985) op cit., and R. A. Freitas Jr., “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations.” Zyvex preprint April (2000), http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Ecophagy.html.
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