Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…That’s right. And I think Mill integrated sort of. You could call it Hayek and anti-Hayek better than Hayek ever did. That’s why I think Mill is the greater thinker of the two. But on the topic of children, what would Mill say, specifically? I guess he could have talked about it if he wanted to, but I don’t know if he was. In today’s world, we send them to school. They’re there for 8 hours a day. Most of the time, it’s probably wasted, and we just use a lot of coercion on them. We don’t need to. How would he think about this issue? There’s Mill’s own upbringing, which was quite strict and by current standards, oppressive, but apparently extremely effective in making Mill smart. So I think Mill very much thought that kids should be induced to learn the classics, but he also stressed they needed free play of the imagination in a way that he drew from German and also British Romanticism, and he wanted some kind of synthesis of the two. But by current standards, Mill, I think, still would be seen as a meanie toward kids. But he was progressive by the standards of his own day.…

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