Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…If you’re relying exclusively on YouTube, good luck. To do history really well is to have a sense that you need to see very different perspectives on events that you want to understand, and you need to get as close to the actual original sources as you can. The fact that so much information is now available online is a two-edged sword. It’s mostly good, but there’s also lots of misinformation that’s woven into it, and it can be very hard to tell the information from the misinformation. Then there’s also a notion that everything is already there online, when in point of fact, lots of information about the past still only exists in archives. It’s also the fact that archives themselves are only a partial survival mechanism for all the things that did happen in the past, most of which were not well documented if we get beyond top political leadership. It’s endlessly difficult, I think, to try to get into a history that is truly true, given those difficulties. You do some serious talks on YouTube, which I think represent your views quite accurately. It’s you, right? Yes.…

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