Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Interesting. On that trade off, where should one be if they're trying to reason about important topics? Should you just try to increase the variance so you can get to the important things? Again, I think it’s context specific. You want to understand where a person is, understand they were probably born that way and that you can only budge them so much, regardless of wherever you might think they should be. Just try to marginally improve how they're dealing with the flow coming their way. I prefer to work with people's strengths and boost their strengths, rather than have a list set out of how to reform them. I think it's a way more productive way to do things. It's lower conflict, and as a coach or mentor or co-worker, it's way less stressful for you. Because you're being very positive with them, and it's sincere, so you'll just do more of it. If you're hitting them over the head, “Why don't wake up at 7am in the morning,” and maybe they should, but it's like come on, you have something better to do than that. They can figure that out for themselves. Tell them something else that they can actually find useful. When you interviewed Andrew Sullivan, one of the things he said was that the reason he decided to write about gay rights was that he got HIV, and he realized he might not have that long to live. Yeah. Ofcourse, we see the consequence of that in society today. If you find out you only have five years to live, what is the book you would write and what is the argument you would make?…

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