Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I’m Owen Evans from Oxford. I’m going to give a science fiction–type scenario that maybe has some relevance to talent. Imagine that, say, half of all people had an identical twin, and some people have 10 identical twins. We’re in this very different world, and talent identification, in some sense, is much easier. What kind of impact would that have on, say, start-ups or maybe other spheres where talent is important? I think there’s somewhat less information contained in identical twins than many people in the Bay Area would suppose. I think maybe America, as a whole, might underrate the role of genetic factors in talent. But the people who think about it at all, I think, tend to overrate significantly how much it matters. There are plenty of identical twins with very different outcomes. There are quite a few of them while they’re both law partners in Cincinnati, but at the highest levels, those very small differences — it’s like a multiplicative model. You need to have eight or nine very definite things go to an A or A+ level for you, and it might happen for you and not for your identical twin. So, I think, at the highest levels of achievement, identical twins do not contain a lot of information, and they would not be that useful in talent search. I wouldn’t go around like, “Oh, did someone clone Bill Gates?” That’s sort of like an identical twin. Or “It’s the eight-year-old who was the clone Bill Gates. I want to support that person with some VC money.” It’s still a better than average bet, obviously, but that would not be my obsession. Absolutely not. There’s some weird confluence of environment and genes and circumstance that maybe you know it when you see it. But ex ante, trying to predict that by looking at any one of the factors, I don’t think you’ll get very far. Hi, Andy.…

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