Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Today people would say, I was talking to Basil Halperin, who’s a young economist, and he said he was raised on Marginal Revolution in the same way that you were raised on the history of economic thought. Does this seem like a good trade? Are you happy that people today are raised on Scott Alexander and Marginal Revolution? At the margin, I would like to see more people raised on Marginal Revolution. I don’t just mean that in a selfish way. Regarding the internet writing mode of thinking, I would like to see more economists and research scientists raised on it, but the number may be higher than we think. If I hadn’t run Emergent Ventures, I wouldn’t know about Basil, per se, maybe would not have met him. And it’s infectious, so it might always be a minority, but it will be the people most likely to have new ideas. It’s a very powerful new mode of thought, which I’ll call the Internet way of writing and thinking. And it’s not sufficiently recognized as something like a new field or discipline, but that’s what it is. I wonder if you’re doing enough of that when it comes to AI, where I think you have really interesting thoughts about GPD, five-level stuff, but somebody with your sort of polymathic understanding of different fields, if you just extrapolate out these trends, it seems like you might have a lot of interesting thoughts about what might be possible with something much further down the line.…

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