Robin Hanson: prediction

Transcript context

…What are they signaling? People like art for relatively mundane reasons, but we like to think we like it for grand reasons. I’ve actually had friends of mine from a while ago who are musicians saying we should subsidize music because we’ll have more world peace. The world will have less war and more peace if we subsidize music. I suppose other people probably say that about art. It’s just one of those feel-good sort of things. Art is a thing you’re supposed to feel good about, and that’s how it’s supposed to produce all the good things. It probably produces health and empathy and long life and faithfulness to your spouse. If one goes to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as I’ve been, you’ll notice there are a fair number of elderly people there, as is also the case at the opera. As people get older, why is it that biologically they’ve evolved to keep on signaling? There are some signals they send much more of—high-culture signals. A lot of learning classes are done primarily by the elderly. What determines the cross-section here?…

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