Robin Hanson: belief

Transcript context

…There’d be widespread agreement on that, but that doesn’t mean the downward-sloping demand curve explains 100 percent of what’s going on. There are many other levels of explanation, what persons are expecting, or the meaning a particular action has to them, covered by other social sciences, for instance, the humanities. The downward-sloping demand curve, in a sense, its explanatory power is really quite small. Would you agree to a comparable redescription for signaling that by one metric, it is very large and significant, but that’s only one layer of explanation for social phenomena in general, and there’s another way in which signaling is really a pretty small percentage of what’s going on? Sure, absolutely. Anything you’re trying to explain, you’re trying to explain in terms of causes. There are local proximate causes, and there are distal far causes, and there’s a whole chain in between. You have to identify where along that chain you’re trying to talk about. We’re talking about people’s behavior, and we’re focused on the proximate explanation. Then you’re focused on what was in their head a moment before, and what sort of feelings did they have, et cetera. Whereas, if you’re looking for an ultimate explanation, then you have to go back to physics and the creation of the universe, evolution and selection, et cetera. Then we’re usually talking at some intermediate level, but it’s less clear which level. So I would say, for our book, we’re focused on relatively distal social explanations, which are more about the basic forces that shape our common social institutions. Why are schools the way they are? Why are hospitals the way they are? This one dimension, it matters to you a disproportionate amount, right? You would agree, or you wouldn’t have written the book. And this ultimately, in my vision, ties into Robin Hanson, the moralist. My Straussian reading of this book is that it’s presented as amoral, but underneath, it’s really deeply moral rather than morally neutral, and you’re, in a sense, afraid to signal your actual moral condemnatory stance. Agree or disagree?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.