Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I have to raise money. We’re always hustling, whether it’s government grants or raising money from private individuals. It’s more managing. It’s having enough of an understanding of all of these different subfields to know when someone’s really good at them. Whether I can look at a paper and go, “Okay, that person is really good at this.” Or go, “The paper’s worth citing.” Or, “They’re really talented. I would love to invite them to join our project because it would be wonderful to collaborate with them.” Again, every archaeologist who directs a project is the same as me. I just happen to specialize in a form of technology. And by the way, I feel like I’m drowning constantly. I can’t keep up. There are so many new satellites and sensors and tools and techniques and new programs, I get overwhelmed. I’m a mom. I’m a busy professor. I have my students, so I’m constantly behind. But again, my colleagues would tell you the same thing. I think you said in one of your YouTube talks, there are only a few hundred space archaeologists. What’s the binding constraint? What stops there from being more? I think the training. I trained for years and years, I took a lot of remote sensing classes, computational classes. I don’t program. I can’t code — that’s my line. I could have gone down that road. It was too much. It was way, way, way too much for me to do that. I would say it just takes a long time to learn, to get really good at it. With the students I’ve mentored at my university — they do an introductory course, and then they do an advanced applications course. After about year of taking these courses and really intensely working in a lab environment, then and only then, the students start feeling comfortable doing project work on their own. It takes a year of intensive training. This is one of the reasons I started my not-for-profit and our citizen archaeology platform because everyone is born an explorer. Everyone is good at using their eyes or understanding the environment around them and making observational or cueing observation. This online citizen archaeology platform gives the world a chance to look at satellite images and help find sites and, ultimately, help scale the work that we’re doing. I want to turn as many people around the world into space archaeologists. It’s fun. They can do it. They’re really good at it. We need more eyes mapping these sites.…

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