Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. In the face of your gloominess, I found my natural optimism re-arising. I don’t know whether that’s good or bad. I guess we’ll see what actually happens. It’s kind of foolish to talk about it or to forecast it. I do think there’s an interesting dynamic going on now between… It reminds them a little bit of other social issues, climate change, you name it, where people argue that we should be more worried than we might otherwise be because that otherwise will encourage people to be less worried. I don’t know. I find that hard to be sensitive to. There was a big dustup yesterday on Twitter because John Ioannidis suggested that were in the dark here. We might be overreacting. We don’t have much data. Us and Taleb and others responded back, “That’s why you have to be extra careful.” Yes, I agree with Taleb on that. I would say I’ve become much more pessimistic about our ability to respond to climate change, because what we’re seeing with coronavirus is how unwilling so many people are to act until the very last moment, if even that. To make a sacrifice.…

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