Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Speaking of Tetlock, are there any really important questions in economics or social science that . . . What would be your top three questions that you’d love to see get more attention? Well, what’s the single question is hard to say. But in general, the role of what is sometimes called culture. What is culture? How does environment matter? I’m sure you know the twin studies where you have identical twins separated at birth, and they grow up in two separate environments and they seem to turn out more or less the same. That’s suggesting some kinds of environmental differences don’t matter. But then if you simply look at different countries, people who grow up, say, in Croatia compared to people who grow up in Sweden — they have quite different norms, attitudes, practices. So when you’re controlling the environment that much, surrounding culture matters a great deal. So what are the margins where it matters and doesn’t? What are the mechanisms? That, to me, is one important question. A question that will become increasingly important is why do face-to-face interactions matter? Why don’t we only interact with people online? Teach them online, have them work for us online. Seems that doesn’t work. You need to meet people. But what is it? Is it the ability to kind of look them square in the eye in meatspace? Is it that you have your peripheral vision picking up other things they do? Is it that subconsciously somehow you’re smelling them or taking in some other kind of input? What’s really special about face-to-face? How can we measure it? How can we try to recreate that through AR or VR? I think that’s a big frontier question right now. It’d help us boost productivity a lot. Those would be two examples of issues I think about. How to make philanthropy better. Everyone says measure results. I think it’s become a cliché. It’s trivial. It’s begging the question. What is it you’re measuring? What counts as good? What counts as bad? Might it not be the case, a lot of initiatives will do better by not trying to measure results and do better getting outliers rather than homogenizing . . . with everyone running after the same easy-to-measure kinds of results. So okay, if it’s not measure results, what is it then? We need more philanthropic experiments and to think about them critically. Those, to me, are some of the frontier issues right now. If the whole economics discipline came around to our view of having a deep concern for long-term future, what neglected topics do you think they might spend a lot more time on?…

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