Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
34 published records
01 / belief
“I think that probably the single best thing is that Stalin was, in his own way, a sincere Marxist-Leninist.”
02 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / belief
“I think of a lot of what people are signaling is just, they’re signaling to get opportunities.”
05 / 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.”
06 / belief
“If I think about some of the things you like or love, I think of, say, 18th century classical music, Wagnerian opera, certain traditions within graphic novels, a number of TV shows — one would be Ali G — Chinese opera, Gilbert and Sullivan, Larry David.”
07 / 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.”
08 / evaluation
“Also, in your book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, you’re saying, at least within certain margins of acceptable behavior, parenting doesn’t matter that much.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / belief
“Let’s say we agree with your basic take on education: There’s educational failures.”
12 / 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.”
13 / belief
“One area you’ve read a lot in, but I think never quite focused on, is personality psychology.”
14 / belief
“If that weren’t available, then there’s room in business, banking, moneylending, shipping. I think I could learn those.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / belief
“I think Noah Smith had a challenge: “Name the two or three papers on each topic that are really convincing.”
18 / 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.”
19 / 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.”
20 / 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.”
21 / 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.”
22 / 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.”
23 / 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.”
24 / 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.”
25 / 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.”
26 / 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.”
27 / 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.”
28 / 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.”
29 / 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.”
30 / 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.”
31 / prediction
“I do say, “Look, if you find it funny, good odds I won’t think it’s funny because anyone can understand it.”
32 / 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.”
33 / 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.”
34 / 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.”