Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…“Things I’m reading: Swedish basket making, Austrian economics, astrophysics.” You’re the omnivore. I think, on the contrary, that in an age of specialization, it’s got to be an advantage to be a generalist. The problem with being a generalist — and as a journalist, it’s sort of what I am — is you have to understand the whole field, and you’ve got to know who’s over here on this side of the field, who’s over there. When you try to capture the field, you don’t want to take too many risks. You want to go right down the middle of what’s conventional within the field, rather than picking some Loony Tune. That turns out to be a rather hard thing to do. In some fields, there’s no middle. I would say the study of intelligence — what’s the correlation between IQ and success? I think there are randomly divergent explanations, and if you wander into that field and you pick one, all the other people will say you’re an idiot. But in general, I think the ability to do what journalists do, which is to go into a field and understand what’s the consensus here, and then to compare the field of economics to the field of physics — I think there’s great fertility there. Here’s a question for both of us. I’ll answer it first. “What do the two of you admire about each other? ” I would say, when any question or topic comes up, that you put what is humane about the issue first, and that this is truly internalized. It’s not just a habit you force on yourself. It may have somewhat been that at first, which is pretty common, but it is you now, and it’s the most defining feature of you. That would be my answer. Wow. That is the person I’d like to be, actually, so I find that very honoring. Thank you. Somebody said, actually, in that book, that he didn’t know anybody with more conceptual models in your head that you can apply to any situation. I would just say the one feature I admire more than any others is to be a lifelong learner. There’s a book I read by a woman named Susan Engle. There’s a woman named Susan Engle who works here in the Y. She did some research into how many questions does a three-year-old ask. The median three-year-old is 140 questions an hour. If any of you have kids, you’ve been there. But then they go to elementary school, and the teachers know that if the kid asks the questions, it’ll take them off course, and they won’t be able to cover content. This woman — she’s observing classrooms, and literally, she writes down, “A teacher says this.” Some kids had found an old-fashioned scale in the classroom, and they were playing around with it, figuring out how it worked. The teacher said to them, “We don’t have time to experiment now. We’re doing science.” That’s the way they repress curiosity, but your curiosity has not been repressed.…

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