Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
55 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn’t focus on the really big issues.”
02 / commitment
“I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way.”
03 / belief
“Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins… I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness.”
04 / uncertainty
“What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time.”
05 / commitment
“We have a plan for how we're going to do this, and we're going to stick to it, and we are ready to lose a whole lot of our soldiers in order to do this, and then we are going to go and find people that we are going to very gradually transition power to.”
06 / belief
“First of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions.”
07 / belief
“If you have an effective altruism point of view, however, where it's not just feeling a lot of caring emotions, but being very committed to thinking clearly about the best way to get good results, then I'll say those people are more heroic people in my view.”
08 / belief
“I would say that there's this whole literature on credibility saying, “No, what you really want is to be honest and in a very credible way such that when you say I'm going to do something in 20 years, people believe you.”
09 / belief
“There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there.”
10 / belief
““I believe that in America, no student should ever be denied full access to the maximum opportunities of education merely because they were born in a family that was too poor to afford it.”
11 / belief
“” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture.”
12 / belief
“” I mean, when people talk about this stuff, what really strikes me is that I felt like I learned more from just going and looking at the time series as far back as it goes than from every person that pontificated about what's really going on.”
13 / belief
“” We're not going to turn the camera, but I think that listeners will believe that it is not on fire.”
14 / belief
“The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India.”
15 / belief
“My view is that it was this British-based anti-slavery movement that was really key, which then spread to the colonies.”
16 / belief
“Traffic, parking, quality, the character of the neighborhood, pollution, and on and on, they make every possible complaint. So I think the main reason anything gets built is that there are developers who probably do not really sincerely believe that they're heroes, but just come and say, “Hey, well, we can make our money building stuff.”
17 / evaluation
“If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.”
18 / evaluation
“For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do.”
19 / commitment
“If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers.”
20 / recommendation
“I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing.”
21 / prediction
“If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity.”
22 / recommendation
“” well yeah, I would have ladies’ night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business!”
23 / evaluation
“I think business history is less historically contingent, but we actually do have a lot of evidence that the quality of entrepreneurship and management varies a lot from country to country, which I think does actually mean that for the really big businesses.”
24 / prediction
“Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain.”
25 / evaluation
“The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often.”
26 / belief
“I think that probably the single best thing is that Stalin was, in his own way, a sincere Marxist-Leninist.”
27 / belief
“First of all, of course assuming you’re good at languages, Greek as a Western language would be easier. I think that is actually the biggest city in the Western world at the time.”
28 / belief
“In terms of other things that seem changed, just the much greater availability of entertainment — this is something that I think has replaced a lot of things that people were doing in earlier periods.”
29 / belief
“I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just, they’re signaling to get opportunities.”
30 / belief
“Generally, I would say I get about a 15 percent response rate for the people saying they’ll at least read something, so I feel like it does give me some good quality control.”
31 / belief
“If the internet existed when I was in high school, I might have actually failed out of high school because I would have put so much energy into creating web pages, like “This is my take on each of these different topics.”
32 / belief
“If that were widely believed by people of power, I think there would be a lot more effort to actually double-check that what they’re doing really makes sense.”
33 / belief
“For high school, then, it’s modest, so maybe reducing it by something like 30 percent. But on the other hand, for college, where the completion probability is a lot lower than it is for high school, then I think reducing it by 40, maybe even 50 percent.”
34 / belief
“For me, a big part, one of the main things I learned from my students for The Case against Education was just saying, “All right.”
35 / belief
“If that weren’t available, then there’s room in business, banking, moneylending, shipping. I think I could learn those.”
36 / belief
“Especially like economists, when they do psychology, they only read a few parts of psychology, and there’s a bunch of other areas they just don’t pay much attention to that I think also are leading to some tough results.”
37 / belief
“” I think effective altruism is all about, let’s try to get some actual measures of how much good is being done and to raise the status of that.”
38 / belief
“I think Noah Smith had a challenge: “Name the two or three papers on each topic that are really convincing.”
39 / belief
“I think we agree this is actually one of the most undervalued benefits of school choice, just giving kids some options so that kids that are crying and miserable at one school can go and take that money and go to another school.”
40 / belief
“Even the topics — when he gets on what I think of as sci-fi topic, those are the parts where I am least happy.”
41 / observation
“I am tempted to say something along the lines of God will punish you for bad behavior. But the problem is that’s mixed in with — so many things of the bad behavior is actually good behavior and the good behavior is actually bad behavior that I’m not convinced that is all that socially useful.”
42 / belief
“What I would say is definitely worth some experiments. When you’re spending an enormous amount of money, you can take off 2 percent of it, and then use standard social science random assignment to really learn something.”
43 / belief
“Furthermore, as I say in the book, if the model of actual employment in the real world were, “Hire someone, see if they’re good, and then if they’re not as good as you thought, fire them,” then I think your story’d make a lot more sense.”
44 / belief
“” The Socratic dialogues, out of all the stuff in ancient philosophy, I think that is close to the top of what I would enjoy reading to get something out of.”
45 / belief
“I think that is a big part of what makes parenting so unpleasant in the modern US — the sense of “If I’m not acting all the time to go and help my kids, then I’m a failure, and my kids will be failures.”
46 / evaluation
“When someone says, “Look, the government funds it all, but they don’t spend very much. So the way to get spending down is for government to increase spending” — I think that is one of the strangest inferences I’ve heard in social science.”
47 / evaluation
“There were many issues that I was grappling with, a lot of it under the influence of Ayn Rand, where the more I learned in philosophy, the more dissatisfied I became, and yet I couldn’t think of anything else that made any sense.”
48 / commitment
“I will say, when I am going and checking on my references with the original authors, the one thing where I basically never contradict the author is if they say, “You misunderstood me.”
49 / recommendation
“For a graduate student, then, I would say that social network is hugely important because, especially if you want to be a professor, then your professors have the job you want, and they know other people who have that job.”
50 / evaluation
“In a way, I would think of the last few years as cutting against my model because it seems like people are getting very angry and very populist when it’s hard to even find what the supposed cause of it is.”
51 / evaluation
“Again, I think of this as primarily a disease of government because it’s so based upon what people say rather than trying to do a comparison between what we thought was going to happen and how things actually turned out.”
52 / prediction
“I do say, “Look, if you find it funny, good odds I won’t think it’s funny because anyone can understand it.”
53 / preference
“I want to begin with what I think of as one of the great neglected moral concepts in academic philosophy, which is the concept of blameworthiness and desert.”
54 / preference
“The comedy seems to be very different. But for everything else, for anything that presents itself as serious art, for me what I would say is, I like what some people love.”
55 / preference
“In a way, if you don’t think the culture’s really important, it’s hard to be an individualist because then you aren’t different from other people.”