Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…But the Hitler, Stalin, Mao's. Was there something that was going on that explains why that was just a crummy time for world leaders? I don't think I have a good macro explanation of that whole trend, but I would say a few things. That's right after the period where the world is changing the most. I think when you get big new technologies, and this is relevant for AI, you get a lot of new arms races. Sometimes the bad people win those arms races. So at least for quite a while, you had Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany winning some arms races, and they're not democratic systems. Later you have China with Mao being not a democratic system. And then you have a mix of bad luck. Stalin and Mao just draw the urn. You could have gotten less crazy people than what you got. And I agree with Hayek, the worst get to the top under autocracy. But like, they're that bad. That was just some bad luck too. There are other things you could say, but I think we had a highly disoriented civilization. You see it in aesthetics approaching beginnings of World War I. Art, music, radically changing. People feel very disoriented. There's a lot up for grabs. Imperialism, colonialism start to be factors. There wasn't like a stable world order, and then you had some bad luck tossed into that. And all of a sudden, these super destructive weapon systems compared to what we had had, and it was awful. I'm not pretending that's some kind of full explanation, but that would be like a partial start. You compared our current period to 17th-century England, where you have a lot of new ideas and things go topsy-turvy. What's your theory of why things go topsy-turvy at the same time when these eras come about? What causes this volatility?…

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