Tyler Cowen: prediction

Transcript context

…Oddly enough, I did become more trusting. Unfortunately, during those years, at first, I became less prepared to deal with bad actors. I learned the hard way that if you’re basically honest, if you believe in the ninth commandment, you will never be able to confront successfully someone who lies for a living. That was a painful lesson that took a couple years to sink in. It wasn’t a good year or two. I think much of Craigslist is saying you can trust other people if the incentives and institutions are correct. Your nine-second rule—wait for nine seconds and think before clicking on something you get, say, in your email or on a social network site—is a lack of trust. Is it that your views have changed, or how does the whole picture fit together? I have learned something and my team has learned something from real life. The notion is that a normal, a very common technique of scammers is to rush you into something, to convince you of the scam by making it sound urgent. If you wait a little while, stereotypically nine seconds, you can reconsider what they’re doing, and then you can evade certain kinds of scams. I screwed up in that respect about 10 years ago, but in a small way, I just lost a credit card number. I realized it not long after and changed it, but that’s stupid. I’m trying to learn other things as well, working potentially with the AARP because, if nothing else, my wife has to monitor her mom’s credit card purchases because there’s often issues there.…

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