Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
32 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 / 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.”
03 / belief
“First of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / belief
“” We're not going to turn the camera, but I think that listeners will believe that it is not on fire.”
11 / 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.”
12 / belief
“My view is that it was this British-based anti-slavery movement that was really key, which then spread to the colonies.”
13 / 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.”
14 / belief
“I think that probably the single best thing is that Stalin was, in his own way, a sincere Marxist-Leninist.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / belief
“I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just, they’re signaling to get opportunities.”
18 / 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.”
19 / 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.”
20 / 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.”
21 / 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.”
22 / 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.”
23 / belief
“If that weren’t available, then there’s room in business, banking, moneylending, shipping. I think I could learn those.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / belief
“I think Noah Smith had a challenge: “Name the two or three papers on each topic that are really convincing.”
27 / 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.”
28 / 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.”
29 / 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.”
30 / 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.”
31 / 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.”
32 / 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.”