Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I'm guessing ever since you wrote the progress studies article, you got a lot of applications for Emergent Ventures from people who want to do some progress studies thing on the margins. Do you wish you got fewer of those proposals or more of them? Do you just wish they were unrelated? I don't know. To date, a lot of them have been quite good, and many of them are people who are here. There's a danger that as the thing becomes more popular, at the margin they become much worse. I guess I'm expecting that, so maybe mentally I'm raising my own bar on those. Maybe over time, I find it more attractive if the person is interested in, say, the Industrial Revolution. If they're interested in progress studies, capital P, capital S, I'm growing more skeptical of that over time. Not that I think there's anything intrinsically bad about it—I'm at a progress studies conference with you. But still, when you think about selection and adverse selection, I think you've got to be very careful and keep on raising the bar there. It's still probably good if those people do something in capital P, capital S progress studies, but it's not necessarily good for Emergent Ventures to just keep on funding the number. If you buy your picture of AI where it increases growth rates by half a percentage point, what does your portfolio look like?…

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