Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think of neuroticism? Is neuroticism good, bad? I think for the very highest level of top creative achievers, you want to look for some neuroticism. You see this most clearly in musicians and artists, the very greatest ones. You read their biographies, and you’re like, “What? He or she did that?” And they’re weird. They can, in bad ways, be abusive, but there’s some way in which seeing the world so differently just makes them be off. That said, for most jobs, you want it in some kind of check, but there’s a whole host of jobs where neuroticism is just a positive. Say you want someone who works in a nonprofit, and in essence, their job is to go out and complain about social injustice. They’re going to be underpaid. That person’s probably going to be pretty neurotic. They probably need to be. They’re underpaid. They’re satisfying their neuroticism. Let’s run with that, thinking about how the context matters, but don’t consider it an unalloyed negative, would be my key point there. That seems to make a lot of sense. It does seem like, at least now, from where we sit, the winds of COVID have slowed a little bit, but let’s assume remote work is here to stay. Let’s buy that narrative for a moment. Does that change how you think of what to look for in interviews at all?…

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