Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…What do you mean, “right”? Expand. [laughter] We each know some people who just went crazy, often in non-libertarian directions. Some of them become, oddly enough, fans of Putin, while we’re on the Russian topic, or they just stop believing in scientific argument and discourse. The saner thing to do — and you see this with many people from the progressive left as well — is just to become more moderate, more uncertain, to have better epistemic practices and take a broader swathe of history more seriously, and I think Grossman is doing that. How much of history he’s taking seriously, not just the one point in front of his eyes, the Battle of Stalingrad, but the AI section — whether you agree or not, he’s looking to the future. He’s definitely looking for the Russian and Soviet past as well, the Ukrainian past, Jewish history, the Hebrew Bible. It’s spanning a lot. That’s one reason why I think it’s epistemically pretty non- or anti-fanatical and pretty rational. I have a couple fanaticisms. I’ve got my libertarian flavor and my religious observance. They’ve both become tempered in some dimension as I’ve gotten older. I don’t think it’s to avoid insanity, by the way.…

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