Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…When I’m going through and reading papers, oftentimes I’ll find that there’s something I don’t understand very well or something that seems questionable. Usually, as long as the authors are living, I do try to actually reach out to them and get clarifications. The next thing is when I’ve got what I think is a good, solid draft of a book. That’s where I enlist my RA and say, “Get me all the emails of all the living people I’ve cited in the book so far,” and then email all of them with two offers. One of them is an offer to show them the entire manuscript. The other one — so that I’m not over on the far right side of the Laffer curve — is to say, “Or, if you’re busy, then I could just tell you the exact pages where I discuss your works, so at least you can tell me whether I’m accurately summarizing your work or not.” For me, what I do is so interdisciplinary so I’m always worried about this autodidact’s curse, where you’ve read a ton of stuff but you still haven’t actually talked to anyone who knows what’s going on. This is one of the things that I try to do to deal with especially the wisdom of a field. Oftentimes there’s wisdom in a field, where it’s known to people who have thought about it for a long time, but they don’t write it down. Of course, that’s very hard for the autodidact to find out. “What is the wisdom in your field that you don’t write down?” This is where I try to reach out to people. Generally, I would say I get about a 15 percent response rate for the people saying they’ll at least read something, so I feel like it does give me some good quality control. One area you’ve read a lot in, but I think never quite focused on, is personality psychology. What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned from personality psychology? I do have one paper on this, “Stigler-Becker versus Myers-Briggs.” Let’s see . . . the single most interesting thing about personality psychology . . . At least one thing that might be a good answer is that cheerfulness loads on extroversion. There’s something actually very social about happiness. When you read this, it makes so much sense — how little of happiness seems to be about material possessions and how much of it is about having good relationships with other people. You can think about animals. When I read you something about animals, the animals that laugh, they’re all social animals. Dogs laugh, chimpanzees laugh, humans laugh. You never hear about a tiger laughing, these very asocial animals. At least that’s one that I often do think about, is this connection between social interaction and being happy.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.