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Tyler Cowen - Talent, Collapse, & Sex
It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.
We discuss how sex is more pessimistic than he is, why he expects society to collapse permanently, why humility, stimulants, intelligence, & stimulants are overrated, how he identifies talent, deceit, & ambition, & much much much more!
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.
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Timestamps
(0:00) -Did Caplan Change On Education?
(1:17) -Travel vs. History
(3:10) -Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?
(6:02) -What Does Talent Correlate With?
(13:00) -Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits
(19:20) -How does Education affect Talent?
(24:34) -Scouting Talent
(33:39) -Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures
(37:16) -Building Writing Stamina
(39:41) -When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?
(43:51) -Spotting Talent (Counter)signals
(53:57) -Will Reading Cowen’s Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?
(1:04:18) -Existential risks and the Longterm
(1:12:45) -Cultivating Young Talent
(1:16:05) -The Lifespans of Public Intellectuals
(1:19:42) Risk Aversion in Academia
(1:26:20) -Is Stagnation Inevitable?
(1:31:33) -What are Podcasts for?
Did Caplan Change On Education?
Tyler Cowen
Ask Bryan about early and late Caplan. In which ways are they not consistent? That's a kind of friendly jab.
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, interesting.
Tyler Cowen
Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, education is so wonderful. It no longer seems to be true but it was true from the data Bryan took from. Bryan doesn't think education really teaches you much.
Dwarkesh Patel
So then why is it making you want a free market?
Tyler Cowen
Yeah. It once did, even though it doesn't now. And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things. But it's teaching them something.
Dwarkesh Patel
I have asked him this. He thinks that it doesn't teach them anything, therefore that woke-ism can’t be a result of colleges. Then I asked him, “okay, at some point, these were ideas in colleges, they're in the broader world. What do you think happened? Why did it transition together?” I don't think he had a good answer to that.
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, you can put this in the podcast if you want. I like the free podcast talk often better than the podcast. [laughs]
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay. Well yeah, we can just start rolling. Today, it is my great pleasure to speak to Tyler Cowen about his new book, “Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.” Tyler, welcome (once again) to The Lunar Society.
Tyler Cowen
Happy to be here, thank you!
Travel vs. History
Dwarkesh Patel 1:51
Okay, excellent. I'll get into talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first. So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think traveling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience to traveling to different countries today? Or is it kind of in the same category?
Tyler Cowen
You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages, and obviously your smartphone is not going to work, right? So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like traveling today, except there'd be bigger surprises because no one else has gone to the past. Older people were there in a sense, but if you go back to ancient Athens, or the peak of the Roman Empire, you're the first traveler.
Dwarkesh Patel
So do you think the experience of reading a history book is somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?
Tyler Cowen
Not at all, I think we understand the past very very poorly. If you’ve traveled appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical about history, because you'll realize how little you can learn about the current places just by reading about them. So it's like Travel versus History, and the historians lose.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, interesting. So I'm curious, how does traveling a lot change your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways does it do so? Are you skeptical of it to an extent that you weren't before and what do you think historians are probably getting wrong?
Tyler Cowen
It may not be a concrete way, but first you ask: was the person there? If it's a biography, did he or she know the subject of the biography? That becomes an extremely important question. I was just in India for the sixth time, I hardly pretend to understand India whatever that possibly might mean. Before I went at all, I'd read a few 100 books about India and I didn't get nothing out of them. But in some sense, I knew nothing about India. Now that I’ve visited, the other things I read make more sense, including the history.
Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?
Dwarkesh Patel
Okay, interesting. So you've asked this question to many of your guests, and I don't think any of them have had a good answer. So let me just ask you: what do you think is the explanation behind Conquest’s Second Law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right wing become left wing over time?
Tyler Cowen
Well, first of all, I'm not sure that Conquest’s Second Law is true. So you have something like the World Bank which was sort of centrist state-ist in the 1960s, and by the 1990s became fairly neoliberal. Now, about what's left wing/right wing and all that… it's global, it's complicated, but it's not a simple case of Conquest’s Second Law holding. So I do think that for a big part of the latter post-war era, some version of Conquest’s Law does mostly hold for the United States. But once you see that it’s not universal, you're just asking: well why have parts? Why has the American intelligentsia shifted to the left? So there's political science literature on educational polarization? [laughs] I wouldn't say it's a settled question, but it's not a huge mystery like Republicans act wackier than Democrats are. The issues realign in particular ways. I believe that’s why Conquest’s Law locally is mostly holding.
Dwarkesh Patel
Oh, interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about the intellectual life that tends to make people left wing? It's particular to our current moment?
Tyler Cowen
I think by choosing the words “left-wing” you're begging the question. There's a lot of historical areas where what is left wing is not even well defined, so in that sense
Published on 3 years, 3 months ago