Robin Hanson

Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University

Robin Hanson has worked as an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University since 1999. He read science fiction as a child, cultivated an interest in physics and artificial intelligence, and currently studies economics and political science. He describes himself as tempted to leave a subject when he has mastered its major insights.

His hobby for many years was imagining and promoting alternative institutions for health care, law enforcement, finding criticism, conversation, dividing chores, encouraging charity, keeping yourself rational, informing elections, and started a mailing list on the topic. Idea Futures, markets whose primary purpose is to aggregate information, instead of to hedge risk or entertain, was his radical alternative to existing academic institutions.

His wide-ranging interest in the future includes engagement in such areas as uploading, nanotech, hypertext publishing, cosmology and the foundations of physics, future economic growth rates, limits of computation, and the origin of life. He has participated in the Extropians mailing list since 1991 and is an Alcor cryonics member. He frequently contributes to the the website Overcoming Bias, an online forum organized by the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute to address the issue of cognitive biases.

video

EFM.edu, Interview with Luis Figueroa

audio

EconTalk, Hanson on Health
1:12:16