Comment by nhaliday | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nhaliday | Hacker News Reader

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> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics.

World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-fan.... I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia.

RE: the list of "wild ideas." He estimates that maybe a third of them are true. Quoting a few and acting shocked that that's the case is not a very epistemically hygienic criticism.

BTW if anyone wants to read a summary that carries some of the tone and emphasis of the book itself, https://casparoesterheld.com/2016/08/30/the-age-of-em-summar... is pretty good.

> World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction

Do you have any evidence that that's true? A decent number of ideas portrayed in science fiction have come true, so clearly successful prediction is going on.

Ultimately, economist or author are both using imagination and extrapolation. I don't see any particular reason to expect better results from the economist.

Unfortunately no, I don't have good evidence.

It's an instance of a more general intuition that excessive consumption of fiction distorts people's beliefs about the world. For example, at some point I saw a study that showed people who watched more TV tended to overestimate rates of violent crime significantly, but I can't find it now.

Anecdotally many people seem to think that human genetic engineering would create permanent class divisions, and they tend to refer to fiction, eg, Gattaca, when asserting this. But that doesn't really make sense. Any rational nation-state would subsidize it massively for the population once it was cheap enough.

> clearly successful prediction is going on.

Throwing out all possible wild ideas, some of which happen to come true, isn't what "prediction" means.

Given the poor prediction reputation of Economists, their attempts probably match your description as well.

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