Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson shows up twice in Kyle’s corpus, both times as an economist whose observations get folded into a larger argument. In the research behind It’s Time To Build… But Build What, his piece “Which Political Axis?” (Overcoming Bias) is collected among the roster of responses to Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto — part of “the fertile conversation” of reactions Kyle gathered alongside Noah Smith, Vitalik Buterin, Ezra Klein, and others (It’s Time To Build… But Build What - Research).

In Talent (Book) (Cowen & Gross), Hanson is the source of the stamina-over-grit observation that the book treats as one of the great underrated concepts for talent search: “the most successful have a lot more energy and stamina than do others… I think this helps explain many cases of ‘why didn’t this brilliant young prodigy succeed?’ Often they didn’t have the stamina, or the will, to apply it.” He also appears in that book’s acknowledgments.

Context: Robin Hanson is an economist at George Mason University, known for prediction markets (“futarchy”), the “grabby aliens” model, The Elephant in the Brain and The Age of Em, and the long-running blog Overcoming Bias.

Where this appears

• Talent (Book) — coined the stamina-over-grit observation the book uses to explain why prodigies often fail to succeed.
• It’s Time To Build… But Build What - Research — his “Which Political Axis?” piece is gathered among the responses to Andreessen’s techno-optimism manifesto.