Tyler Cowen: recommendation

Transcript context

…Oh, yes. The Flynn Effect has actually stopped. Social networks — they’re not ruining the young women chess players. They’re just improving all the time. That’s telling you something about the smart people in society. I think that you can’t just be a programmer alone, that the nature of companies now is not that you do it in your dorm room at Harvard, but it requires synthetic abilities. Sam Altman at OpenAI in his late 30s is the new paradigm, but it’s because of the nature of production that’s changed. Fair enough. Even still, can you tell me . . . My concern is Gen Z — they’re working hard, but so much of their effort is within the black hole of the prestige economy within social media. We can point to MrBeast as a well-known Gen Z person, but that proves the rule that it’s all about doing things to be recognized within this prestige economy, to get likes and followers. That’s to get prestige, and nothing comes out of that world to influence the world that the rest of us live in. Please tell me I’m wrong.…

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