Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, yeah. If I view your work as a complete outsider, I think of you as a living embodiment of John Dewey, and you went to a John Dewey–inspired school. So social communication is a critical idea, a big emphasis on a certain kind of communitarian experience of democracy, pragmatism, thinking in terms of large-scale systems. Yet you don’t cite Dewey much. There’s Wittgenstein. Aristotle you talk about in your philosophical background. My take on you — what is it getting wrong? What am I missing? It’s funny, I tend to be outward bound in my changes in the system, so these are great questions to get me to try to reflect on my interface point to it. I guess what I would say is that I tend to think in terms of systems — Dewey was a system thinker — but then I tend to think in terms of Archimedean levers, by which you change the systems. And I tend to think that there’s a number of different types of Archimedean levers. It can range from ideas or memes. It can range from incentives or culture, and it can range from leaders building organizations or institutions or reforming or renovating those institutions. And I tend to think that you should play a toolset across the whole thing. Now, to some degree, Dewey is a classic pragmatist, and there’s that pragmatism that is definitely one of the things that I, as part of the institution and institution-building, think is super important. But I also value that intellectual work, in terms of just the ideas, and including far-out philosophy. The audio class that I’m listening to right now is science fiction as philosophy, as a re-lens onto everything. And just those pure ideas, the bold ideas which may be always incorrect, are still important to be part of the mix.…

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