Robin Hanson - The Long View

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:05)
Okay, Robin Hanson needs an introduction, so let's begin. So you've written a few essays on The Long View, how there's no significant players that are optimizing for it. But isn't the most obvious explanation for that, that optimizing for the long term is ineffectual, given how unpredictable the future is, or even counterproductive, given that you might be ignoring present circumstances?

**Robin Hanson** (0:25)
Well, if it's unpredictable, then optimizing should take that into account. But it does look like people are deviating from what they would do optimally trying to take the long-term into account, and take into account the actual amount of uncertainty.
That seems, so for example, there's something called discount rates in economics and interest rates. And so if you have the long view, you would take a very low discount rate, that is you would think the future was just as important, although with uncertainty that might make it hard to make some other choices. But for example, resources are just generally useful. So if you just invested in collecting resources, you don't have to know exactly what's going to happen in the future to know that resources are going to be pretty useful, whatever happens. And so if you are discounting the future and not being interested in collecting resources, that's a pretty clear indication that you're not so interested in the long-term future relative to other people who might.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:24)
But if it's true that thinking about the long-term future is useful, then wouldn't you expect the most powerful institutions today to be the ones that thought about the long-term future in the past?

**Robin Hanson** (1:33)
Well that's part of the question I raised in my discussions of it. So you might think that in the very long run there would be selection for thinking more about the long-term future because that would win. If we look at biology, we can think that there's been a very strong competition in biology for influencing the future.
And in some sense, that is what evolution is about.
Species and individuals compete to influence the future. Like having more descendants is the main way that biology influences the future.
Now, animals sometimes make plans, and you as a human might make a plan to save up resources and pass them on to your kids.
And we know that that sort of planning has a discount rate that goes with it, because your kids only share half your genes. So your gene, individual genes, they can't save resources for themselves. They can only save resources for this whole creature that you are, which is a bundle of genes. And this whole creature that you are, when it passes on and has descendants, those descendants only have half as many genes. And so that means that your genes have a choice between doing things that promote the genes right now versus doing things that collect resources and have a 50-50 chance of promoting that gene later on because its descendants may only have a 50% chance of sharing that gene. So that produces a discount factor of once of generation a factor of two. And that's in the ballpark of what actual human discount rates are. And so that is a plausible explanation for human discount rates is that we evolved in this context where when we had a choice to save resources in order to pass it on to the next generation, the next generation only shares half our genes. So see the challenge is to come up with a unit of selection that can pass on resources to itself over the long run. And so what that might be perhaps is a nation or a firm or a religion or some organizational unit. And I think we should reasonably expect that in the long run, organizations will find a way to collect resources and then promote themselves in the long run. But they haven't done that so far because most of the organizations don't really have so much of a separate existence in our world. They are a way that our genes or our individuals use, genes use individuals and individuals use organizations to further their ends. But if the organization wants to just take over and says, I don't care about your genes or individuals, I just want to promote myself, then the individuals and the genes will rebel and bring the organization back in line. That's what's happened so far. Organizations haven't really been able to promote themselves as much as they might like. The closest you might get is say, the religion's encouraging proselytizing, wherever they're promoting the religion.
But they found a way of doing that via the individuals proselytizing and promoting themselves. They found a win-win deal where the organization can promote itself, and the individuals can promote themselves. But that's hard to find. So organizations haven't been able to just collect resources. Because what happens is if a church collects resources or a firm or a club, well, later on, some humans are in charge of that organization, then they just take the resources. They just grab them and say, the heck with this organization, those are tasty resources. I can promote myself and my genes by just grabbing the resources and taking them away from the organization. So for the long run, the question is, how can organizations find a way to collect resources and keep it directed for the purpose of the organization, as opposed to allowing the people who run the organization to grab those resources for themselves?