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this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Also a concept that Scott Aaronson praised Hanson for.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210425233250/https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/994112139420876800
(Crediting the "Great Filter" to Hanson, like Scott Computers there, sounds like some fuckin' bullshit to me. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote, "Why are they not here? There are many possible answers. Although it runs contrary to the heritage of Aristarchus and Copernicus, perhaps we are the first. Some technical civilization must be the first to emerge in the history of the Galaxy. Perhaps we are mistaken in our belief that at least occasional civilizations avoid self-destruction." And in his discussion of abiogenesis: "Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. But life did not evolve beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life. Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables." Boom! There it is, in only the most successful pop-science book of the century.)
A futarchy, you say? Tell me more, Robin Hanson
I noticed that Hanson speculated that "most of the Great Filter is most likely to be explained by [...] the steps in the biological evolution of life and intelligence", and then lied by omission about Sagan's position. He said that Sagan appealed to "social science" and believed that the winnowing effect is civilizations blowing themselves up with nukes. He cites an obscure paper from 1983, while ignoring the, again, most successful pop-science book of the century.