Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…Okay. I think it ultimately expresses itself through The Secret. It’s this idea that if you imagine success, it shall happen, and if you imagine failure, that also shall happen. The mechanism of that is unclear, and, of course, The Secret ends up positing this very strange, this really kooky mechanism, which is your thoughts have magnetic power that actually attract the things that you’re thinking about to you. So if you think about a traffic jam, you’ll end up in one, which is obviously really kooky. But I think that that’s kind of how the human mind works. If I enter into a marriage and I do put the hedge on, which is a prenup . . . I think that the way that our minds work, it says, “Okay, now I’m going to cause that to happen.” That somehow that’s saying that I think it’s going to happen, and I’m going to cause it to happen, as opposed to just saying there’s all sorts of negative routes that your life can… and you’re more likely to have success if you can think about what those routes are and actually get out in front of them. I’m not a gambler myself, and I don’t understand gambling very well, but maybe you can explain it to me. I read an article in the paper today that many gamblers are now betting on shark migration patterns because a lot of the horse races are shut down and dog races are not running. Shark migration patterns — that seems to me also a zero-sum game. Why don’t you all just bet on equities, which at least, we hope, is a positive-sum game? Why do these zero-sum games exist when there’s this one huge, really quite liquid positive-sum game? And I can get as excited about a company as about a horse, right? Well, first of all, I haven’t played poker since 2012, so I’m definitely not betting on shark migration patterns over here. One of the things that I used to say about poker was that you better not be willing to be a poker player unless you want people to endlessly discuss golf propositions. A lot of poker players play golf, and they’re always trying to figure out how many strokes a side, and are we playing a NASA, a scramble, or whatever. And there’s endless conversation because they basically want to turn everything into making a market.…

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