Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think that maybe the simple theory there — that’s a bit of a conspiracy theory — is just true, that Lee Harvey Oswald was just operated by Russian agents he met while he was living in Russia? I think there’s some chance of that, and I think there’s room for a hybrid theory where, actually, they trained him. They told him to go back and do terrible things. One of the things mentioned might have been assassinating a president. Maybe they didn’t even think he was up to it, like he didn’t pass their Diet Coke interview questions. The KGB is pretty rough and tough. Lee Harvey Oswald was, in some ways, apparently, not a very impressive man, but they let him go back, and they’re like, “Oh, you know . . .” It’s like you let people try their start-up, and maybe you’ll never hear from them, and all of a sudden, they wake up one day, and it’s, “Oh, my goodness.” That’s a unicorn from the KGB point of view. It’s very true with start-up companies where — having invested in a lot of early-stage businesses that got big, but also worked at YC. It’s really humbling, in fact, where you’ll meet a cohort of companies at Y Combinator, and you and all of these other partners — who are very, very smart people; many of them are smarter than me — will informally vote on who you think is best, and you’re almost always wrong. It’s almost always the dark horse, and it’s almost always not who the crowd favorite is. I think there’s a humbling lesson there that you could learn in the opposite direction about the JFK assassination. You think Jack Ruby just strolled in one day and shot him? Or do you think there’s something deeper there?…

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