Tyler Cowen: recommendation

Transcript context

…Absolutely. Last year on the retrospective, I think it was in the context of asking what you’ll be working on next, and you mentioned that you had a book that you were working on about top economists, who’s the best economist. You indicated that it was dependent on publishing things, like maybe the paperback of Talent would be coming out, so you were not sure, but it was basically ready. Now here we are a year later, and that book has arrived. Mercatus ended up publishing it in a nontraditional fashion. It’s called GOAT: Who Is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? You haven’t done a ton of interviews or press about it. There’s the EconTalk with Russ Roberts that released in late November, I think. Tell us that story. You had this manuscript — why were you compelled to release it in the way that you did? The site is econgoat.ai. Most of the book I wrote during the depths of the pandemic, the very worst parts, where you couldn’t get to libraries or do many things or travel much. I just thought, “What’s the project I can do where I won’t be driven crazy?” Classic texts, you can work with, either online or I already owned copies, had read them, just needed to reread them a few times. I didn’t know when a book could come out in any form, how the pandemic would evolve, but I thought, “Well, this is timeless. If it doesn’t come out for a number of years, that’s not a problem.” By the time things were reopening, most of the book was written. I just thought, “Well, I’m going to sit on this for a while, improve it slowly, and there’ll be a chance at some point to do something really interesting with it.” Then GPT-4 came along, and I started thinking, “Well, this should be the first book published in GPT-4.” It’s 100,000 words. You can access it through GPT-4 or just read it like a regular book, or interrogate a GPT-4-based app that you helped build and oversaw the construction of, and ask it to summarize chapters, ask it for more background, ask it what mistakes it thinks I made. That’s the future of a lot of learning. I thought, “Let’s be in advance of this.” You’re planning on using it, I believe, in a class that you’re teaching next semester?…

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