Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But can you imagine that, perhaps, we convince many people of this kind of long termist framework. They share our belief that extinction is very possible and will be a terrible catastrophe. So they’re willing to make many concessions perhaps. If you can get China and the United States to band together to say, “Our top priority is avoiding extinction and war, so we’re going to work together very closely.” Not to control everything, just to control access to the kind of technologies that would potentially produce human extinction. Could you see in the next 100, 500 years that kind of cooperation to make humanity more stable and civilization continue? There’s already a great deal of international cooperation on nuclear weapons. Right now, we’re trying to manage the North Korean situation. Cooperation is highly imperfect, but it’s remarkable how much is there. When the Soviet Union was collapsing and there were possibly loose nuclear weapons, there was a good deal of international cooperation to deal with that problem. So we have very immediate successes near us. Could we do better? Absolutely, but the idea of there being this general public movement where you get people to do the right thing by scaring them, I think that’s the opposite of how politics usually works. Voters like to live in denial, and if you scare people too much with, say, climate change, they respond by thinking it’s not actually all that significant. I think some kind of more positive vision — you’re more likely to get people on the sustainability bandwagon. That’s one of the backstories to my book: I’m trying to give a positive vision, emphasizing less scaring the heck out of people and more, “Here are the glories at the end of the road, what you can do for your descendants and world history.” Scaring people seems to backfire in politics. We’ve been talking a lot about the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse here, and that is a somewhat trickier one to figure out how to solve. But you bring up climate change, where it seems like it’s a lot more tractable. It’s pretty clear what kinds of technologies you could work on in order to reduce the risk of really runaway climate change if we get unlucky. Do you think it’s particularly valuable for people to go and work on technologies that differentially reduce the risk of catastrophes like climate change?…

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