Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedRobin Hanson: preference
28 Feb 2018 Conversations with Tyler Robin Hanson on Signaling and Self-Deception (Live at Mason Econ)
“It seems to me the priority is to go figure out more areas of life and see if the middle of the distribution is anywhere close to what people say. That seems, to me, much more valuable than trying to go figure out the variance because all this behavior is really high dimensional.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Robin Hanson
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 28 Feb 2018
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
Transcript context
…Sure. So I think there’s value to do that. Honestly, in our book, we give the first third of the book to a rough summary of the basic theory, and the last two-thirds of the book go over 10 different areas of life, trying to make the case the motives are different. I think you could easily do 20, 30, or even more areas of life. It seems to me the priority is to go figure out more areas of life and see if the middle of the distribution is anywhere close to what people say. That seems, to me, much more valuable than trying to go figure out the variance because all this behavior is really high dimensional. There’s not just one point to go find out to find out the variance. You have to look across many dimensions and figure out, where is the middle of the distribution? That’s more canonical. You can say, what’s the most common motive? What’s the typical case? That’s just a lot easier. How much health insurance should a person buy?…
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