Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I would be lying if I said it didn't change my emotions. I do have a record of 23 wins for 23 bets that have resolved. It is fun to be able to go and say that. To say I've got 29 out of 30 bets won wouldn't sound as good. At the same time, I still am totally willing to make bets. The thing about bets is that it's not like they just come fall into your lap. You really have to aggressively seek them out because hardly anyone wants to bet. At this point, you might think that some people would want to bet me just basically saying, “Well, if I beat him, I'll be the guy that beat him. And if I lose, then who's ever heard of me anyway? Who cares?” But even that doesn't really do very much. The bet that I'm likely to lose is a global warming bet with the standup economist, Yoram Bauman. So that's one where he gave me three to one odds initially. So I was expecting to lose. He very much enjoys running annual victory laps on Twitter without ever mentioning, “Yeah, well, you did give me odds because I wasn't saying that I was convinced. I was saying that I thought that other people were overconfident”. But that's his right to go and run his victory laps. You're like a UFC fighter who hasn't lost. I don't know if you know Khabib Nurmagomedov? He retired before he lost a single fight, I believe. I think he said his reason was, “Oh, my mother doesn't want me to fight anymore. ” [laughs] But one wonders. Are you hopeful that right-wing governments are seeing education polarization and loan forgiveness as a transfer of wealth toward left-wing elites? Are you hopeful that they’ll implement education austerity? Barely. Just to back up, the big policy reform that I push in The Case Against Education is education austerity, which means spending less on education and making education less accessible. Making it less accessible, if I am correct, will be socially desirable, because it will basically mean that credential inflation will be reversed, and people will be able to get the jobs they were going to get anyway while spending fewer years of their lives in school learning stuff that is not very useful. The main reason that I'm skeptical about this is that even in states where the state government is very right-wing, it seems that the prestige of state university systems is sufficiently high that politicians generally don't want to challenge it. In Texas, we both were hanging out around the University of Texas campus, and the state capitol is just a 20-minute walk away. It seems like the governor of Texas does not want to have a throwdown with the president of the University of Texas and say, “Hey, we're sick of this stuff.” Why not? Probably because the governor of Texas thinks that UT, with its great football team, is really popular and that he can't beat them. It’d be hard for him to say, “We're going to pass a bill saying that all the athletics of UT are fully funded, but we are going to go and get rid of the following departments.” It's hard to go and make that happen. The president of UT could probably get the football coach to say, “We stand arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder with our fat studies department,” or whatever. So that is the concern. Florida is a little bit different. It does seem like DeSantis is trying to go and at least make some symbolic efforts against overwhelming left-wing bias at the University of Florida. But as far as I know, he isn’t doing anything about their budgets, which I think they really care about. You can pass all the laws you want, but if you don't actually mess with their money, then I don't think they're going to care that much. The main change that I could plausibly see is defunding the least popular departments while saying we're going to keep the total budget of the school the same. So say, “In the state budget, we are slashing the budgets of the English department, women's studies department, ethnic studies department, sociology,” basically any subject that a normal voter would laugh at when you set when you pronounce the name of the department, maybe they could get away with that. In a way, it just seems too strategic and requires just too much attention from politicians to make them realize this. But, that's the easiest thing to see.…

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