Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…It’s funny, because my bias on this probably goes the other direction. When I watch most media, I am surprised by the discomfort people seem to seek out. I am a fan of the part of movies before anything goes wrong. I really enjoy that first 25 minutes before any kind of conflict emerges in the plot. And I continuously wish that movies would just sort of let me hang out in that happy universe for a longer period of time. When I watch any show recommended by anyone I know, including you, even if the show is putatively a cheery, happy show, the level of discomfort that people seem to want to endure of awkwardness, of conflict, is much higher than where I am. Cable news is another good example. I do not have the constitution to wake up and watch people yell at each other about politics. I don’t know where people get that capability, but I very much don’t have it. My lesson from this I think is in some ways the opposite of yours. People are attracted to a much higher level of conflict than I completely understand, and my sense is that will remain true in a VR-AR world. I don’t really see a reason to believe that would change. So now I could see something that would say there will be a bias against particularly gruesome stories, that there will not be a sharp uptick in people wanting to experience what things are like in Aleppo in a VR-AR world. But I don’t think that moves towards kittens and feel-good stories of happy events. I think you probably have a lot of what I would think of as sort of where news is now — a lot of conflict but conflict in a space of discomfort, conflict in a space of safe outrage, conflict in a space of you think you’re right and the other person is wrong, not necessarily a move towards actual cheeriness. People seem to like cheeriness a lot less than I would think they would. Let’s take podcasts. In your talk with Malcolm Gladwell, you each discussed how it can be hard to use numbers in podcasts, and I agree with that. But in terms of which issues are favored, as podcasts become more and more important, what does this skew our attention towards? It skews our attention towards speculation.…

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