Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…You write a lot about mood affiliation and the problems within it. And you write about this despite the fact that, I think, you believe that cognitive biases are themselves overrated. Can you, just for the folks here, quickly describe your current take on mood affiliation and what it is? And then, what is something that people here don’t believe and really don’t want to hear because of our own sort of collective Bay Area/Silicon Valley mood affiliation? Mood affiliation was a concept I first coined to refer to people who judge arguments by the mood of the argument. There are some writers — maybe they’ll remain nameless — but they’re optimistic. If an argument is optimistic, they think the argument is more likely to be correct: “Well, things have been getting better.” I’m not saying that carries no weight, but be a very strict Bayesian, not just because the mood feels comfortable. A lot of very contemporary partisan debate is really about moods. If you feel someone is not condemning something with the right mood, you’ll reject the attached substantive claim. So a lot of the exercise I do on the blog is trying to teach myself how to detach and how to unbundle things, and inter-temporally substitute moods and contain bundles of optimistic, pessimistic, condemning, approving, tolerant, intolerant — whatever moods — at multiple levels at the same time, in some way. The Bay Area strikes me as having a lot of pearl clutching and a reputation for thinking it’s more tolerant than it is, and I think that’s true of both coasts. I think, in general, all cultures are oblivious. And America, in particular its coasts, tend to think, “We’re the cosmopolitan side of American culture.” And I really don’t believe that. I think you’re a uniquely brilliant, twisted, inward-looking, diverse monoculture, and I’m very glad you are. [laughs] Wait, wait, wait. You’ve already accused us of that. I want something that you, yourself believe or are quite confident is true but that, again, we don’t want to hear.…

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