Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
21 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think, partly, it’s for reasons that come out of Axelrod. So Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation really had a huge influence on how I think about the hive mind.”
02 / belief
“I got to see American Gothic just a couple of days ago. And it really did say something about America that few would have, I think, the nerve to say, in a lot of ways.”
03 / belief
“Bondholders can be a good check on government, just as voters can be a good check on the abuses of government itself. But giving them monopoly powers is far too much for any of the kind of governance systems we care about.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know enough of the history to assess well, but my impression is that McCartney has a reputation for being the guy who just did this schmaltzy love-song stuff.”
05 / belief
“There’s a small number of people making this decision. And I think that the incentive for becoming informed is a greater benefit than the cost of having people who are quite uninformed on the particular topic.”
06 / commitment
“I think that’s the real goal of teaching at the college level. It’s not that I will actually give them the full piece of information, the full body of knowledge in the classroom.”
07 / belief
“I think the idea of social flexibility, openness to new experience — and that latter is correlated with IQ, weakly but positively — those are traits for nonroutine jobs especially, which probably we’re thinking about here.”
08 / belief
“I think the idea of a hive mind or collective intelligence still has the scary downside, and it should.”
09 / belief
“I think that even the insiders have a tough time figuring out what’s going on and who’s responsible, and for that reason, having clear patterns of accountability, say, within .”
10 / belief
“I think also a version of it is just the general difficulties that non-college-educated white men have had across the US, that Mormons are having their own personal version of that.”
11 / belief
“I think there’s some version of this. There is a push-pull element, too. When you’re in a network of people who are trying to do that for you, you end up trying hard to decipher their signals as well.”
12 / evaluation
“Well, some of it is some version of technology shocks, where people find it very expensive in real terms to move out of certain sectors of the economy, whether there’s a regional stickiness to live in a certain area because of family ties, for instance, whether it’s generous unemployment benefits, which are certainly well worth justifying on their own right because starvation as a motivation to work isn’t great.”
13 / evaluation
“I think part of this is that the way jobs are constructed is that jobs are constructed to be, in many ways, foolproof, so that a person can’t screw it up that much. So being the very smartest person in a particular job category might not make you that much more productive than being the worst person in that job category, but that’s partly because that job category was created so people couldn’t screw it up that much.”
14 / evaluation
“Most of us get to choose our own environment as adults. But some of us have our environments as adults forced upon us through, basically, the culture, society we’re living in, and that has a huge effect on how we use our minds.”
15 / recommendation
“I’ll get its name wrong right now because there’s so many of these European courts, but I’d strengthen their jurisdiction to be able to dive into the local political systems of the countries they’re overseeing, make it just a little bit more like a national government.”
16 / evaluation
“I picked that because it’s not outside the range of plausibility, and because I think people would instantly understand what it accomplishes — not because it has the highest payoff, but because it balances payoff with plausibility in a democracy.”
17 / evaluation
“Because the short-run incentives — it’s those campaign ads where the person brags about how many people they convicted.”
18 / evaluation
“No, I love it because it creates more natural experiments for economists to study.”
19 / evaluation
“That’s true, but that’s partly because the rich white elites are acting as the self-appointed representatives of other individuals and groups in society.”
20 / evaluation
“I think, partly, it’s because it’s none of the three Ps of the RPD. But to go beyond that to real substance, it’s that cooperation is pretty dangerous.”
21 / prediction
“I think that’s a little harder case to sell because it is built closer around LDS culture, and so non-Mormons who move there will probably feel quite a bit more isolated.”