Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Well, writing the book titled “GPT-4,” which is not with any known publisher. It’s just online; it’s free, published within GPT-4. It took me quite a while to write the book. I’m not sure there’s a huge downside, but it’s risky in the sense that it’s not what anyone else was doing. So that was a kind of risk. I invested a lot of my writing time in something weird, and I’ve done things like that pretty frequently. So that keeps me, you could say, excited, or starting MRU, the online education videos in economics no pecuniary return to me at all. Indirectly, it costs me a lot of money. That’s a sort of risk. I feel it’s paid off for me in a big way. But on one hand, you can say, “Well, Tyler, what do you actually have from that?” And the answer is nothing. Yeah, well, this actually raises the question I was going to ask about these GO contenders in general, and how you’re judging them, where you’re looking at their work as a whole. Given that, I don’t know, some of these risks pay off that these intellectuals take, some of them don’t pay off. Should we just be looking at their top contributions and just disregard everything else? For Hayek, I think one of the points you have against him is that his top three articles are amazing. But after that, there’s a drop-off. The top risk you take, are they the only ones that matter? Why are we looking at the other stuff? I don’t think they’re the only ones that matter, but I’ll weight them pretty heavily. But your failures do reflect usually in how you think or what you know about the world. So Hayek’s failures, for instance, his inability to come up with a normative standard in “The Constitution of Liberty,” show in some ways he just wasn’t rigorous enough. He was content with the kind of Germanic, put a lot of complex ideas out there and hope they’re profound. And you see that even in his best work. Now, that is profound. But it’s not as if the failures and the best work for all these people are unrelated. And same with Keynes. Like Keynes, more or less changed his mind every year. That’s a strength, but it’s also a weakness. And by considering Keynes’s really good works and bad works, like his defenses of tariffs, you see that. And the best work, he also moved on from in some way. If you read “How to Pay for the War” in 1940, if you didn’t know better, you would think it’s someone criticizing the General Theory.…

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