Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I believe in one-on-one tutors. But I don’t know how much of those examples is selection, right? So I’m not sure how important it is. But just as a matter of fact, if I were a wealthy person and just had a new kid, I would absolutely invest in one-on-one tutors. You talk in the book about how Mill is very concerned about the quality and the character development of the population. But when we think about the fact that somebody like him was elected to the parliament at the time, the greatest thinker who’s alive is elected to government, and it’s hard to imagine that could be true in today’s world. Does he have a point with regards to the quality of the population? Well, Mill, as with women, he thought a lot of improvement was possible. And we shouldn’t overly generalize from seeing all the dunces around us, so to speak. Maybe the book is still out on that one, but it’s an encouraging belief, and I think it’s more right than wrong. There’s been a lot of moral progress since Mill’s time. Not in everything, but certainly in how people treat children or how men treat their wives. And even when you see negative reversals, Stephen Pinker so far seems to be right on that one. But you do see places like Iran. How women were treated seems to have been much better in the 1970s than it is today. So there are definitely reversals.…

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