Bryan Caplan: belief

Transcript context

…We started this conversation with the Bryan Caplan production function, so we’re going to close with it. We have a little bit of time left, three questions about you. First, how do you make yourself a good teacher? Let’s see. For me, any class begins with writing the notes, so I write extremely detailed class notes, where I try to distill everything that’s worth knowing about the subjects at the level of the students. Once I come up with a set of notes, I don’t tend to change them very much, the written parts. When I actually teach, then I do a lot of improvisation. Often, it’s whatever I was thinking about yesterday works its way into the notes in terms of examples. Another big part is actually just trying to talk to the students like human beings and find anything in their experience that relates to what I’m actually talking about. The older I’ve gotten, the less popular culture I have in common with the students, so it does get harder. But The Simpsons fortunately, thank God, is still watched by students, so there’s that. Often, I’ll start by asking them questions. For me, a big part, one of the main things I learned from my students for The Case against Education was just saying, “All right. How many students here have a job?” At George Mason, I’d say 80, 90 percent raised their hand. “How many of you hold a job where there is a person there that everyone agrees is incompetent?” And almost every hand stays up. I’m like, “That’s pretty interesting that almost everyone is at a job where they will say there’s someone who’s known to be incompetent.” That actually did get me searching to what researchers actually found about this, and quite a bit. What is the Ideological Turing Test? And how do you use it to improve your own knowledge and understanding of things?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.