Alex Tabarrok: belief

Transcript context

…You wrote a post on this. Do you remember what you said? I said something like, if the post has got five different explanations for the same phenomena, then it’s a Tyler post. If it has one explanation, simplifying everything down, then it’s an Alex post. If you don’t understand what the post says, it’s a Tyler post. [laughter] If you do understand what the post says, and you hate it, that’s an Alex post. [laughter] I think that rules pretty well. The way I put it is that the first thing I do when coming to a problem is, strip away as much complexity as I possibly can and get down to what I think is the nut of the problem and try and deal with that. While the first thing that Tyler does is, “Let’s think about the five or six or seven things which could influence this, and then we’ll work with those seven different things and try and come up with a solution.” We’re very different in that way. Then, if you force me to add in some complexity — What about this? What about this and this period of time? If you were to force Tyler to take away some complexity, which is really hard to do — so you have to get Tyler, you have to gang up on him with, like, Bryan Caplan and Garett Jones, people at lunch. If you gang up on Tyler and make him strip away the complexity, and you make me add complexity, then actually, we come to the same place, but from very different thinking styles. How about the cadence of the output? Alex, are you ever tempted or inspired to publish more frequently? Or Tyler, have you ever thought about doing twice a week? Or what’s that about the difference?…

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