Robin Hanson teaches economics at GMU. The author considers him to be something like a far more accomplished doppelgänger, for:
- We both are men of similar age.
- We live and work only a few miles apart.
- We work on related subjects.
- We blog on similar, or least usually compatible, ideas.
- We both received our undergraduate degrees from the same institution, 3000 miles away, in the same abstruse subject.
- Hanson, on more than one occasion, has approvingly cited persons, laboring in various vineyards, as friends, acquaintances and influences, which the author too considers to be in the same categories.In no case was this related to the author’s and Hanson’s geographical or educational proximity.
Yet the author has never met Hanson. In fact, so purely verbal has his engagement with Hanson been that should he run across him on the street, as plausibly could happen any day of the week, he most likely would not recognize Hanson.
Doubtless, stranger and more interesting coincidences occur to readers every day.
