Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Why do they have to do it in this traditional academic way where they have to become part of the literature and go through peer review? Since it’s fast-paced and so much of this discourse is happening online through essays and social media, why put that burden on them that they have to go into this more traditional form? Well, they should do both. They’ve already done the other, right? Peer review is super useful. You have things where there’s a deliberate exchange of, “Does this argument succeed or not?” where people scrutinize it very carefully, not just some weird blog commentators. It works for every other science. It’s worked for climate change. What we’ve learned from climate change is that the arguments for — to call it warming is an oversimplification — but let’s say warming for now, they really do hold up with a lot of different sources of support, but the claim that the costs of global warming are going up, that’s a much weaker claim. By running everything through the ringer, while those will all still continue to be revised, that’s what we’ve learned. It’s super valuable. We would not have gotten there with weird blog commentators. We needed refereeing and peer review, and it does take longer. Again, these arguments have been around a while. I think Eliezer, I’m guessing now, boy, it’s 15 to 20 years, he’s been saying this. I’ve even said to some philanthropists, “You should support this as a project. It’s not that expensive.” I volunteered to do some refereeing for free. I’m still waiting for the phone to ring, to use the proverbial metaphor. There’s a new AI service that — and I can’t think of the name of it.…

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