Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Richard Prum. His basic point was he loves birds. He loves birds, and that guides everything he does. He doesn’t particularly care about grand research agendas or revealing the answer to big questions. He just wants to discover something cool about birds. What do you think? Is that a general approach that should be followed? Or is that maybe unique to ornithology? Richard’s a great person to study, I think, to learn how to be successful, and that is to care more than the others. You have to do more than that, but it’s a great starting point. All right, last one. “The most important thing you can do in that remaining part of your life must be intellectual succession in planning. Academic life, in my view, has gone off the rails in ways that I never would have imagined in the 1980s when I was starting out. We need new institutions, and I want to spend more time on institution building and less time on book writing in whatever time is left to me, and that should strike terror in my enemies’ hearts.”…

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