Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I was absolutely going to say, well, maybe we’ve just got the best arguments. Okay, fine, I’ve got to give an entirely sociological explanation. One is, I think there just was an untapped market of altruistically minded people. I think that especially this kind of effective altruism is much broader than consequentialism, but consequentialism-flavored ethical views correlate with being very high educationally performing. I think it’s also the case that something that correlates with being high educationally performing is just being secure about your material needs, whether that’s because you come from a better family, but also because your career prospect is looking pretty good. I think of altruism like a luxury good. The more secure you are, the more you can focus on that. One thing is, we’ve tapped into this market that I think wasn’t otherwise being tapped into. Then a second thing I could say is that the topics are just very intellectually interesting and a very unusual intersection of intellectually interesting and extremely impactful and important for one’s own life, and in fact, how the world should be. You’re making arguments about paradoxes in population ethics and moral philosophy, and the resolution there is really going to make a difference to what you should do. Perhaps that’s more attractive to the nerds of the world, too. Let me make a sociological observation of my own. If I think about making the world a better place, I think so much about so many things being downstream from culture, that we need to think about culture. This is quite a messy topic. It’s not easily amenable to what you might call optimization kinds of reasoning. Then, when I hear EA discussions, they seem very often to be about optimization — so many chats online or in person, like how many chickens are worth a cow, the bed net versus the anti-malaria program. I often think that this is maybe my biggest difference with EA — that EA has the wrong emphasis, pushing people into the optimization discussions when it should be more about improving the quality of institutions and management everywhere in a way that depends on culture, which is this harder thing to manage. This may even get back to subsidizing Mozart’s Magic Flute. There’s something about the sociology of EA that strongly encourages, especially online, what I would call the optimization mindset. What’s your response to that? I think I’m going to surprise you and agree with you, Tyler. I’m not sure it’s about optimization, but here’s a certain critique that one could make of EA, in general or traditionally. It’s like, hey, you have a bunch of nerds. You have a bunch of STEM people. The way your brains work will be inclined to focus on technology or technological fixes and not on mushy things, like institutions and culture, but they’re super important. I, at least, think that that criticism has a lot going for that. I don’t want to wholesale endorse it because often, you just can have technological fixes to what are even sociological problems, where the risk of an engineered pandemic killing hundreds of millions of people. That is, in part, a sociological or political problem because it’s going to be an individual that builds it and does it. We could just solve it with technology, though — early warning detection systems, far UVC lighting that sterilizes wounds. There doesn’t need to be a match between political or sociological problems and political or cultural responses. But I do think that culture is just enormously important. That’s something I’ve changed my view on and appreciated a lot over the last few years, just as I started to learn more about history, about the cultural evolution literature, about Joseph Henrich’s work and our understanding of humanity as a species. Actually, one of my favorite and most underrated articles is by Nathan Nunn. It’s called “History as Evolution,” which I think is extremely good.…

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