Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think there are some good challenges and some bad challenges. I would say the bad challenges are almost like an emotional response of “People should be listening to me, and yet they’re off doing this Facebook thing and not listening to me.” So the fact that attention flows in a different way — and that’s both economics and everything else — I think is what causes a bad response because part of Facebook is saying, “Hey, we’re enabling every individual to speak and connect and follow what they want.” I think the good response is that once you become social infrastructure, you should also be responsive to society. Let me put that point a little bit more bluntly, which is, if you have a system that’s designed for velocity as its measure, velocity is more likely to be things that you negatively react to. It’s more likely to be anger. It’s more likely to be outrage. It’s more likely to be fear. So just as the dynamic is that most people tend to share links before they’ve even read the thing that’s in the link, as a way of doing it, which leads to a circling thing of title bait and everything else as a way of doing it, I’d say that increases an overall agitation in society. And we say, well, that’s not necessarily good, even though each individual is following their own reflex. That overall increase in agitation is not a good thing, and we need to figure out how to do better there. But if I think of a lot of people in other countries, often they will hate Facebook less. If I think of radio people, they might be skeptical about Facebook, but they rarely hate Facebook. But newspaper people seem to. How much of that is just flat-out competitive rivalry, and the newspapers have been losing? Well, that was my first area, where the newspapers go, “You should be listening to me, and you’re paying attention to this Facebook thing instead. And I have less career prospects because Facebook is taking more of the economics than the newspaper work.” In fact, the thing that I’m always unsympathetic to people on this, is they say, “Well, I’d like to return to the past. I’d like to go back to the golden age of newspapers.” And you’re like, “No, no. Actually, how do you design a better future? What’s the way you say, ‘Well, we want the functions, the civil function that newspapers are doing. What’s the way we design it in the modern framework?’”…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.