Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…For me, it’s a continuum. All of my science fiction-y books have had callbacks to historical themes, some more than others. I’ve always enjoyed history. When I’ve had the opportunity to write historical fiction, I’ve greatly enjoyed it. It’s been a while since I went there, and it was like going home almost, being able to go back and work in a historical setting again. Sometimes I think that when the present and future are changing most rapidly, that’s when we need to write about the past, that it’s easier to speculate about the future when nothing’s happening. It’s interesting that we’re in a weird situation now, where I think that people’s formal education in history is probably at an all-time low, and yet, there are all of these new ways of learning about history that didn’t exist 50 years ago. There are podcasts and YouTube videos and so on that you can sink your teeth into if you decide that you’re interested in some particular era of history. I think that more and more, what we have now is autodidacts out there who, on their own time, not at school but during their leisure time, have decided to become history geeks.…

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