Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Huh, that’s interesting. I guess it may be the question of how you respond to different circumstances. Peter grew up in his high school at Foster City. I, pre–high school, was in Berkeley. They’re not that far apart from each other. But I guess what I would say is that, when I encountered and saw suffering of people around me, and that would range anything from — my mom was one of the first women through law school at Cal and joined Wilson Sonsini. Partners then were making jokes about “Now they’re letting the secretaries become lawyers,” and so forth. Seeing what impact it would have, my reaction was, how do we reformulate society to be on trend to less suffering and to more evolution of who we would be? I don’t know if it was a particular experience of it that was like this one catalytic moment, this moment of epiphany, other than that was the way that I was reacting to a set of things that I was seeing. If we think of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, they could arguably, by the standards of many people, be called weird. I’ve reviewed all the books you’ve written and a lot of your public talks. I can’t recall you saying a single thing that’s outrageous in any way whatsoever. Why aren’t you weirder? [laughs] Maybe I mask it better. That’s my Straussian element, that I hide my weirdness. I would say that a little bit of it comes down to a theory about what is the right way of evolving discourse. I think I probably do have a variety of views that people would think is weird. I, for example, think of myself as a mystical atheist, which is neither the full atheist category nor any religious category, but some blend in the middle. Or the fact that I actually think that the notion of capitalism is one of the world’s leading interesting technologies, but it’s not a particularly good philosophy, and you’d think that’s odd for an entrepreneur or an investor, and so forth. So I have areas where I would say groups of people would think I’m weird. I may not highlight it because I tend to always speak in a way to, how do I think I help us make the most progress? And I would only say the weird things if I thought that was the thing that would result from that.…

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