Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
46 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think, for all of us, the idea that someone can do magic — if it’s done right, it’s very cool.”
02 / belief
“I learned that there’s a guy there whose name either I’ve forgotten or protecting by not giving his name.”
03 / belief
“I think there’s something illiberal in the human heart. I recently reread Orwell’s 1984, and what staggered me about it is that Orwell’s of two minds, and that’s the power of the book.”
04 / belief
“One thing I learned being on a jury — I learned close up, of course; this is part of the common wisdom about juries — is that juries bring to bear some assessments that are accuracy-independent moral views.”
05 / belief
“Speaking of liberals who aren’t always in the canon, I think Kymlicka is very good.”
06 / belief
“I think the great liberal thinkers now who are younger may be in the social sciences.”
07 / belief
“There are ones that I think you were particularly interested in getting skilled people in who are completely amazing and can make our country more prosperous and ultimately lots more well-being — let them in.”
08 / belief
“I think if it’s challenging for you and me to come to a long list of philosophers rather than economists, it might be just that their early career and what they’re going to look like when they’re mid-career is obscure.”
09 / belief
“I think the idea of AI trials looks very thinkable today. What role for the human overseer is TBD.”
10 / belief
“I think that the form of liberalism that is the origin of woke is Mill’s book on the subjection of women, which is one of the great liberal texts.”
11 / belief
“Esther Duflo is a great liberal thinker. She just moved to Zurich, I think, from MIT.”
12 / belief
“I think we should start with egregious cases where people are losing money or time without getting adequate clarity on that’s what’s happening to them.”
13 / belief
“I think the principal thing I learned is how he took standard songs that were classics and twisted them in directions that made them new, not only by doing things to the music, but also by taking words that had a certain meaning back then and giving them a different kind of meaning.”
14 / belief
“Dick York was better, but I saw recently an interview with Elizabeth Montgomery, I think — either she or someone who’s involved in the show — who said Dick York liked her a little more than was comfortable.”
15 / belief
“I think there’s a way of doing it that is more in sadness than in anger, though if people are committing crimes, of course, some anger isn’t a bad idea.”
16 / evaluation
“The idea that you can regulate a politician’s speech because AI played a significant role, or maybe the entire role — that’s very hard to defend.”
17 / evaluation
“I think we should say that AI is like a vacuum cleaner or a toaster, let’s say a speaking one.”
18 / evaluation
“One thing — I think I haven’t gotten this clear enough in my own mind — but one thing the woke left, let’s say, has gone wrong with — both in terms of strategy, but also in terms of how to be in the world — is a kind of arrogant — the word “shaming” is right — shaming of people who are deserving respect.”
19 / preference
“I don’t like it at all, but it pains me to say that because I really admire Waldron.”
20 / evaluation
“Parfit — some of the anti-individualist and anti-identity and self stuff, the stuff that looks illiberal and also looks brilliant but peculiar — I think he’s replicating the early research agenda of Kahneman and Tversky, coming up with very exotic cases and then asking himself what he and others think about them and then giving those things authority.”
21 / evaluation
“Instead, he basically reported, after obsessive work — I think two years of work — on the correspondence between Mill and Taylor, and the correspondence is one of the closest things we have to the fictional correspondence in my favorite book, which is Byatt’s Possession, where the letters are ones of surpassing beauty.”
22 / evaluation
“I think the liberal view is — this is something that some liberal thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, have written about — there’s tragedy, and to recognize that tragedy is inevitable is a way of keeping an incentive to reduce the number and ferocity.”
23 / preference
“Sendhil Mullainathan, who is one of my favorite current thinkers — he’s not philosophically focused, but he’s just writing a paper now on behavioral economics, where agency is moving to the fore.”
24 / prediction
“Some liberals are very open to immigration. That tends to be the liberal tendency, but some people who believe in freedom and in the rule of law and in pluralism worry that excessive immigration can start undermining those things, partly because it might make pluralism not self-sustaining.”
25 / belief
“I think that — yeah, yeah, Irish family. I think underrated. Ulysses is arguably the richest novel in the last 150 years.”
26 / belief
“Now, it is true that the heroin ban does not eliminate heroin, and it has ancillary consequences that aren’t good. But I would say with respect to some product — let’s say it’s a food where there’s a 1/x chance of death from consuming it, and x is not that high a number — to say to people, you know, “You can have this.”
27 / belief
“” To be too critical of your own production, I think, is — at the early stages, at least — is an error.”
28 / disagreement
“Where we disagree, if we do — I think we probably do — is that I am more concerned about the need for stable rules that discipline judicial authority, even if it would be exercised wisely by some judges.”
29 / belief
“I think hope and change of the New Hope sort, whatever your political affiliation — you know, Senator Cruz is a big Star Wars fan; Donald Trump is a Star Wars fan.”
30 / commitment
“I have no writer’s block, but I will write a lot of stuff that no one will ever see because it’s too terrible.”
31 / belief
“We can be a decent person on that day or not.” And I think that kind of somewhat innocent and earnest thinking — that you are at a crossroads, you can go one way rather than the other — is basically the authorial voice behind Star Wars.”
32 / belief
“I think Yoda — maybe that’s a headline to a more convincing account than Yoda was able to give in the confines of the movie.”
33 / belief
“What I think Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution is true here: it’s too soon to tell.”
34 / belief
“I think the answer is that there’s a technological something that Star Trek captures, and there’s nothing quite like that that Star Wars gets at.”
35 / evaluation
“There — one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there’s none that is the worst of the Star Wars movies.”
36 / belief
“I think that’s part of what makes the Star Wars saga work, that these are legitimate questions.”
37 / belief
“I think preferences are a very good clue to what is going to promote people’s welfare.”
38 / evaluation
“I think one of the, you know, sources of awesomeness in these cartoonlike, improbably awesome movies is that an interpretation like the one that you offered is eminently plausible, and there’s material there that justifies it.”
39 / evaluation
“But the title wrong-foots you. But I think that’s his greatest album, actually, and so it’s underrated.”
40 / evaluation
“Now, if you push me to talk about liberty — that liberty is an ingredient in welfare, meaning being able to go the direction that you want is welfare-promoting for the people who are exercising their freedom, that’s one point. And the other point is the Millian point that there are multiple contexts, at least, let’s say — we don’t want to make a theology of this, as I think Mill sometimes almost did — but we want to acknowledge that people know, you know, by and large, in acknowledging the behavioral biases better than third parties, what will make their lives go better.”
41 / commitment
“You know, I worked with him for four years, and people who work under the President, I think, have an obligation not to break with their former boss publicly.”
42 / prediction
“I think presumptively that’s a very good idea — 480,000 Americans die every year; if we can cut that number, that’s a good thing.”
43 / evaluation
“Another way to put it is that — I think you’re onto something actually very deep about the movies, which is that Yoda is nominally the wise person, but he makes a kind of fundamental error, which is, he thinks that detachment is good and attachment is bad.”
44 / evaluation
“On the other hand, the federal government has some regulatory authority under the Civil Rights Act. And if you’re falling asleep a little bit because I’m not talking about transgender in the large, I’m sad you’re falling asleep but a little happy that hair isn’t on fire, because one way democracies work well is they put people’s hair on fire very rarely.”
45 / evaluation
“” And that was his model. But there’s a twist here that involves freedom of choice and redemption concretized in the idea of a father whose life course had been dedicated to terrible things repudiating that life course and choosing to save his child because he can’t bear that loss.”
46 / disagreement
“I agree with a lot of what you said, but there’s one thing you said which is the level of colossal error of the President’s in saying New Hope is the best.”