Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Tomorrow will be like yesterday, until it isn’t. I’m curious. I got way overexcited about fairness and way overexcited about driverless cars. Is that the same phenomenon? Meaning, all the hype and excitement that this was different, that they’d solved this problem, that there was going to be this new world. I’d call it more of an optimism bias. I wanted to believe that we’d solved, improved, transformed. Did you fall prey to that? I think you were right to be excited about driverless vehicles. They’re not going to revolutionize the world tomorrow, but I think that will happen within our lifetimes in a significant way. On fairness, though, I just wasn’t paying that much attention to. I have become successively less skeptical about longevity research, I would say that. I think it’s a long, slow haul and a tough slog, so I don’t have a utopian vision there. I think there’s so much talent now working on those problems, we’ll make some progress on them. Those would be my two responses. It’s hard to know. There were so many smart people — and I just got swept up in the excitement — so many smart people who said within three years we’re going to have driverless cars — 35,000 lives saved because there won’t be any deaths on the highway. True, there might be a few more pedestrians killed, but it’s going to be a huge advantage for improvement in human life. I think the technical problems there turned out to be quite a bit more daunting. I think a different kind of bias is we just assume that technology and focus will solve anything. Often it does — amazing. Getting a vaccine in a weekend, that was a great moment of human achievement. So many other things turned out to be harder.…

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