> In comparison, Forbes 30U30, MIT Tech Review TR35, or Stat Wunderkind, and other industry awards that highlight talent are lagging indicators of success.
At least one of these you have to explicitly ask to be added to to be mentioned in. It's worthless as a measure of value, yet taken to be one by this person.
That's what more money than sense gets you, I guess: A worship of dilettantes and a reliance on marketers to make commercials to advertise every opportunity to you.
One of the most smartest people you'll ever read or speak to. It seems he has at least a modest understanding of important topics in almost any field you can mention, and an impressive mastery in a few dozen. From Brutalist architecture, tennis to Latin American art.
He talks and writes about politics, but rarely if ever is dogmatic or partisan. Has no problem admitting he was wrong about something, or that he doesn't know the answer (depressingly rare).
I highly recommend his blog and podcast. IMO the most underrated interviewer in the game. Each of his guests he researches deeply and always asks the most incisive, intelligent questions you wish you had thought of.
TC is fairly popular among the HN set but could always be more widely known.
I first learned about him when I moved to DC and discovered Tyler Cowen's Ethnic Dining Guide (https://tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com/) which had my family and I traveling all over the DC metro area trying some of the cool picks from the list. I am amazed that he has time to keep it up given all the other stuff he's up to, but I think that sort of sums up his nature :)
Yes! When I travel anywhere, I look to see if Tyler Cowen has been there first - he has recommendations for what to see, how to see it, and what to eat.
> Has no problem admitting he was wrong about something, or that he doesn't know the answer (depressingly rare).
On the contrary, he generally suggests that government and "experts" can analyze issues and devise appropriate "policies" (including climate changes, yep) for all of us.
I tried to ignore that for years, but the pattern continued so eventually I had to stop following him. More recently I heard - those interested may want to check his blog rather than believe my recollection - that he was in favor of strict lockdowns or mandatory vaccination (I can't remember which, but I wasn't surprised when I heard about it).
Sounds like the issue of correlation and causation isn't solidified here. Maybe the very fact of Tyler Cowen recognizes them is what makes them so successful. He invests, puts their names out there and a lot of the elements needed for success fall at their feet. Or maybe Cowen made a deal with the devil and can predict the future. Hard to tell without a control group where Cowen doesn't exist.
I agree there is likely impact from the recognition itself.
Shouldn't be hard to verify, no? Have him pick 2N candidates, randomly select half that he can not announce publicly, talk to or otherwise influence (impossible to prevent entirely but "good enough" will suffice to establish a difference). Then look at how the two groups are doing some time down the line.
If I was a person trying to find talented people with potential to do great things, and I cared about the quality of my selection process, I think doing things like that would be extremely necessary.
You can't improve what you can't measure.
But is the goal of these sorts of things often actually to select the best?
Why would Cowen want to actually empirically test their skills? They're getting articles about their supposed mystical powers written up right now. Why risk tossing that away and find out for real, with very limited upside?
Right: if PR and kudos for yourself is the point, you don't want to test it.
But if you want to do this sort of thing for some sort of "making the world a better place" reason... or want to actually truly select the best... you gotta test it!
You should email him and ask him if he's considered this. Of all funders, he seems like one of the most likely to consider doing this (and given some of the people he funds, it may actually be possible to run some sort of experiment while minimizing moral hazard). I'm fairly certain he'd at least answer the question though.
What’s in it for him? Wouldn’t he be even happier to be actually helping his companies succeed rather than just picking them? If he finds 2N great companies, you’re asking him to pass up half of the money he could make... to prove... that he doesn’t actually benefit the companies that he invests in, and only selects them?
The goal is certainly the reverse: get the full return, and demonstrate that it's not just your name and address book that are helping.
And yes, this requires you to be very self-reflecting and open to the possibility of being wrong, but is it truly so hard to imagine that someone would rather know than not know?
But why is it better (for him, for anyone) for his success to come from one avenue than another? If he knows "companies I invest in tend to succeed," it's hard to see why he would skip over a great company, possibly allowing them to fail. It might even be considered unethical if that company produces something useful to the world.
I mean, you can compare the performance of different grant programs against each other. But it's worth noting that Emergent Ventures is not very widely publicized, even by Cowen himself.
It's easier to take him at his own word - the program is so effective because the audience is self selected:
> “I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are writing me. If I had too many not smart emails I would feel that I was doing something else wrong with what I’m writing.” … “The rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I’m lowering it just by talking about the program.”
> As discussed above, Tyler eliminates the first need - efficiency - through selective distribution. Because the program keeps a low profile, there is a manageable number of applications (2000 at current date, running over the past 4 years) and the average quality is very high. At least for a hyperlexic, it is indeed possible to read and score every essay.
I'm a grantee of Tyler's Emergent Ventures program (I was in batch 2) and I have to say that I was impressed by the people I met during the Emergent Ventures unconference (there was one two years ago and there will be another one this November). I really felt out of place, since everyone else seemed so much more accomplished and smart.
There's lots written about imposter syndrome probably worth checking out. A good tidbit of advice I have heard for when you feel unqualified or out of place:
Ask yourself, do you think the person who invited you / hired you is stupid? Probably not, given the people around you smart and capable.
In this specific case, of course, finding people who are not yet accomplished is entirely the point.
Thank you! That's true, and I didn't mean to say that I think that I'm stupid or unaccomplished. I feel like I deserved it. I was just impressed by some of the other people.
For example, there was this teenager who was building CubeSats. All I did at that age was play World of Warcraft =D
A better way of getting the point across is “spend time with people who can help you grow”. And since no human is the best at everything, two people can both help each other grow.
It's far more complicated than that. The maxim doesn't model a world where everyone has a smarts score, and everyone knows what everyone else's score is. That's not how the world works.
What it's really saying is that if you believe that you are the smartest person in the room, and you are there just to teach, as you have little to learn, that you need to be in a room where you really believe you have a lot to learn from the others there. This is true regardless of how much better, or worse, you happen to be.
I sure have seen rooms where almost everyone thought they were the smartest person in the room, and others where nobody thought they were the smartest. A common problem in startups is that you end up building the first room, when you really need to be building the second.
If a room empties out because everyone thought they were the smartest, maybe the room needed to empty out.
Please note that the corollary is finding a room that contains at least one person as smart as you are or smarter. If that seems too high a bar, you've got problems.
Cowen is truly unique. He's one of the only "public intellectuals" who has replied to my random emails on multiple occasions.
Everyone should listen to some episodes of Conversations with Tyler. I normally hate interview podcasts, but it is bar none the best one out there. It doesn't matter the topic - the questions he is able to hit his subjects with are amazing, nothing at all like how most interviews go.
Russ tries really hard to keep an open mind, but especially now that he's getting more into political philosophy I find it hard to take him seriously depending on the guest. It can be interesting to listen to his shit takes for a while, but it grows tiresome pretty quickly.
Wow, is there some other Russ Roberts with a podcast? I can't believe you'd say this. He's the most thoughtful, humble, and introspective interviewer I'm aware of. What in the world do you mean by "shit takes"?
Long time listener of Econtalk, but Russ tends to digress a lot and covers his interests. Still a great show, but Conversations feels on another level.
I have on occasion reached out to public intellectuals for personal advice and wisdom over the years. Unique among everyone, he's been invariably wise and generous with me (a total stranger). He also writes back almost immediately.
The only people online who have a similarly thoughtful and generous spirit, in my direct experience, is Russ Roberts and Scott Alexander.
Prob reveals a lot about the media I consume (and my demo profile) but I am definitely open to others if there are more like these three out there.
I'm going to comment on the second part. I enjoyed his podcast for quite a while, never liked the interview-type podcasts before. Once the pandemic started last year, somehow he came of for me as completely disconnected from the real world, just living in his own safe bubble and passing judgement based on his privileged status, basically becoming very "academic".
The section on art collecting highlights the limitations of an economics-based approach to defining "talent." Cowen is an economist and this colors his entire approach.
“You learn about other cultures, you learn different points of view by refining your eye and you develop a skill that is extremely useful for judging other things and cracking cultural codes in other settings. It’s an education in market economics - art markets. Like how do you buy the best pictures in an area Haitian art, or how do you assemble a very good voodoo flag collection? How do you get artists in Mexico to do their best work for you? That’s a business problem that you need to solve.
You want experience at solving a broad diversity of problems, to heighten your aesthetic sense, to learn some real history, and to understand how some of the art world works, surround yourself with beauty.
And you should buy it for the love of the art, and try to find that which other people have not really found or appreciated yet. It’s just like the world of ideas right? It is the world of ideas. It just costs more to play in it in terms of upfront dollar commitments.” [Tyler Cowen: Production Function. David Perrell, North Star Podcast.]
Relying on markets and the opinions of others may be effective in determining current economic value, but it is not a fruitful approach for finding "talent", broadly defined. Contemporary art is an excellent place to observe this phenomenon; there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value." The art market is a fascinating thing, but make no mistake, the most popular artists are not the most "talented", by whatever definition of talent you may have.
"Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values."
Philosophers, artists, and other thinkers have written about aesthetics for thousands of years.
Truly answering your question would take a long time, but a short version might be something like: the collective opinions of a diverse group of highly informed and experienced (not necessarily educated as in a university) individuals. But that's just one approach and there are many others.
Even then, anything is probably superior to using monetary value as equivalent to anything other than what the market currently prices it as. I certainly don't think the most expensive painting is the most beautiful one, although it may be not be totally uncorrelated.
If you're interested in these kinds of questions, definitely look into the philosophical field of aesthetics.
This reminds me of a debate we're having in Sweden presently around architecture. Most contemporary architects seem to prefer buildings as big concrete blocks while most "common folk" would prefer something... less modern? A perfect example is the new art museum which you can see here https://www.svd.se/liljevalchs-tillbyggnad--ett-bankvalv-for.... I personally find it revolting, but am I then the person without taste?
I think much of contemporary art and architecture is stuck in a monocultural loop. There is no input from aesthetically-educated people that are outside the academy or architecture/art industry. It is extremely anti-diverse, especially compared to previous centuries where you had the entire swath of society working on a structure. Hence you’ll get things like that building.
And no I wouldn’t say you have no taste. Most aestheticians throughout (global) history would likely dislike that building. It’s only a recent phenomenon that such styles became so prevalent, largely out of ignorance or rejection of previous things.
I have some experience with the philosophy of aesthetics from my stints as a slightly more active amateur photographer. I'm sure there's much I could still benefit from learning, though. Do you have a recommendation for a book?
A sibling comment to yours pointed out a critical flaw in using price as a measure: it gives different people very unequally sized votes.
Measuring instead in something like logarithmic uttiles would instead give all people a similarly-sized vote.
My problem with all measures of aesthetics that do not give everyone an equal vote (like your proposal for a committee of experts) is the fat selection bias inherent.
I can think of no way to produce that committee that doesn't involve self-reinforcing feedback loops that bias the committee toward a local optimum that doesn't actually reflect the standards of all of humanity.
----
But. Then again, maybe this is one of those situations Weisberg talks about where trying to find the "main effect", i.e. the aggregate opinion of all humans, is meaningless.
Maybe it's more interesting to find out what specific groups of people think, and then I'm sure a committee of such people works. But one has to be up-front about what is then measured.
Unfortunately I don't know of any introductory aesthetics books that aren't heavy on the philosophical language. For that reason I would just recommend reading this IEP article. It covers the standard traditional Western conception of aesthetics, the basic ideas, and so on.
If you don't mind reading a dictionary, The Dictionary of Aesthetics by Dabney Townsend is also a good overview of many different ideas and terms.
Otherwise, I am a big fan of Japanese aesthetics, which is much more "in the world" than the more abstract Western philosophical approach. For this, I really recommend the short essay A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie.
Also, one of my favorite novels is My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It is about Ottoman miniature painting and has extensive discussion on aesthetics, painting, and similar topics.
On your other comment, I might agree with Weisberg that we aren't really going for an aggregate opinion of everyone. Instead, we need a way to measure the opinions of a diverse group of experts, whatever that might mean specifically.
A good analogue might be military strategy. If we were to ask "Who was the best general of all time?", we'd likely want to ask military historians (academic experts), actual generals (experiential experts), as well as amateur enthusiasts that are extremely knowledgeable but don't have the right credentials. We'd also probably want various other groups of people like soldiers, politicians, (resurrected) great generals like Napoleon or Hannibal themselves, etc.
As long as we had a decent method for validating membership of these different groups, I think we'd get a reasonably decent answer.
In terms of architecture, this expert-only approach might have some limitations and we would need to add the townspeople and library readers to our analysis. But this is more because buildings are something practical used in the world and not just art in a gallery.
At the very least we can recognize that "market value" and "aesthetic value" are two different things. The only thing you are really measuring when looking at the economics of art is the "market value" so the other thing you have to pass over in silence, as Wittgenstein would say.
The art world is notorious for being a tax avoidance scheme, on top of money laundering and all sorts of other related activities. Tying market value and aesthetic value in the art world makes about as much sense as introducing the concept of "aesthetic value" when talking about Apple's stock price.
> Tying market value and aesthetic value in the art world makes about as much sense as introducing the concept of "aesthetic value" when talking about Apple's stock price.
What about introducing it when talking about GameStop's stock price?
So artistry has long included subverting people's expectations and perspectives. That doesn't mean aesthetics, which is linked to artistry, is the same as the thing being subverted, or innately measured in the same way as how subverted the thing is.
I realize this is unsatisfying to many, but there really is no other choice. A strict empiricist has no way of knowing whether or not art is good. In fact, a purely empirical worldview will find it hard to have art in it at all. There's no way to distinguish subjective from arbitrary.
If you do accept that taste exists and that subjective != arbitrary, we can move forward and discuss it without expecting externally verifiable tests for it. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't believe that art exists at all... or that we can gain any knowledge of it if it does.
Substituting price or popularity for quality is redundant. Just think in terms of price or popularity, and forget about quality. Calling popularity quality just because it's easier to define or measure muddies things up, whether or not you believe in taste.
Let me reverse your question: why would you use "how much oligarchic wealth someone has" or, possibly, "how intent on money laundering the buyer is", to determine aesthetic value?
But money doesn't measure work. One hour of work by Jeff Bezos trumps what most make in a year.
Moreover, it doesn't even work as a relative scale. If Jeff Bezos spends half his fortune on one art piece, he is still one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. He won't be materially affected by this in any way. If I spend half my savings on an art piece, that puts me at a substantial risk (2 catastrophes and I'm broke).
Basically, Jeff has little opportunity cost to spending 50 billion, while I have enormous opportunity cost to spending 50,000. But Jeff doesn't work 1 million times as much as I do for that.
It may be a mistake focusing on "Cowen is an economist." He does happen to be one, but everyone is something.
This may mean that he's applying a economist's mindset, like an engineer might apply an engineering mindset... but either might be besides the point. More about choice of method and language than substance.
I only brought it up because the author mentions the humanities as being critically important to Cowen's analysis method. Yet I think his approach is fundamentally still economic in nature, likely because of Cowen's economist background.
Tyler calls his study of the humanities “cracking cultural codes,” and he highlights this as the most “importantly novel” activity he practices.
I'm suggesting that this may be besides the point. I don't really know, but I suspect that while being an economist lends a lot of form, it might not be all that important to substance... or less important than other things, even though it's highly visible.
For example, Tyler will try to quantify desires with money. How much would you have to pay me to do this, or how much would I pay to do it. That's a very economist-ey quirk, but I'm not sure it changes outcomes as much as it might seem.
Re: art, I think the identity points that matter is that Tyler isn't an artist. What he is isn't necessarily all that important. He's a pretty weird guy, and a lot of his instincts are probably more artist-like than economist-like anyway.
> there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value."
Art appreciation extends beyond mere aesthetic value. For example we are able to create pottery that is far more aesthetically pleasing than ancient times. Yet a rare, archeological pot is probably going to fetch far more value than a piece from your neighborhood artist who probably has far more knowledge about pottery than his ancient equivalent.
> Contemporary art is an excellent place to observe this phenomenon; there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value."
There's something very strange I've noticed in contemporary art, that in the last 20-30 years the value of talent, hard work, and aesthetics have dimished massively in critics and influencers eyes.
I don't think it's made the world a better place. It's almost like creating anti-art is now trendy and popular, creating aesthetic art is seen as boring and old. Chaos is preferred over order, destroying and standing up to old structures is seen as art, not building on previous knowledge.
Now I know there is a lot of value in rebelling, I rebelled a lot myself, but I think it's gone way overboard. You need a balance of rebellion and the old. Rebellion by itself is destructive over the long run.
It's also worth noting that Tyler is an uncommonly good interviewer, largely because he asks very good, and unique, questions (see https://conversationswithtyler.com/). I suspect these two skills are related.
I think it's even better the other way around: he has a knack for coming up with counter-intuitive explanations, or re-framing problems or issues in a way that is illuminating or goes against conventional wisdom. Like about healthcare for example.
Agreed, and he asks unique questions not only because he's got an unusual turn of mind, but because he does (or seems to do) an enormous amount of prep work for each interview. Some of my favorite moments on that show are when he asks a subject something related to an old blog post they wrote on a personal topic, or a paper they contributed to as a grad student, and they're like "wait, you know about that?"
He does but it’s only partly due to his omnivorous interests and mostly due to the fact that he does a boatload of research on the interviewee, so there’s hard work involved too. (he reveals this in a meta episode)
>Still, the program keeps a low profile. Even with Tyler’s tall stature, a Google search of “Emergent Ventures Tyler Cowen” shows results only from Tyler / GMU’s own promotion, one short TechCrunch article, a mention on LessWrong / Effective Altruism, a mention on Hacker News, and a small number of Emergent Ventures winners’ blogs and podcasts.
Well, publishing articles with hyperbolic titles seems like painting a big, glowing target for status-seekers to come and ruin Cowen's signal-to-noise ratio.
I say this because back when I used to frequent Marginal Revolution, I found that there was a good deal of self-promotion of Cowen's work in the website - for example, he would link an interesting news story and provide minimal commentary, but then would link his tangentially related research. I understand his incentive for doing this, but the amount of self-promotion was enough to annoy me and make me stop reading.
Years later, I attended a presentation that Cowen gave that was ostensibly on his book the Great Stagnation, but in reality it turned out to be a demonstration of some online learning venture he was bankrolling at the time.
He's a smart and productive guy, no doubt, but my (anecdotal) experiences make me wonder about what is behind an article like this.
I think I know the one you're talking about, and he wasn't bankrolling it -- it was just one of his projects through Mercatus. And they had a bunch of course content on the Great Stagnation, which was definitely relevant.
Apologies, I should've really just said that he had a vested interest in it.
Either way, the people that came to the presentation didn't come to hear about the product he was promoting - we wanted, at least I wanted, to hear the ideas in his book. Instead we got the old switcheroo.
And Mercatus is in turn has been bankrolled by the Koch brothers. I may be biased but I sort of see Cowan’s part of role as something akin to cross between a PR rep and a economic academic rep for a particular set of views to align with that funding source.
Tyler believes what he believes, and would be trying to do what he's trying to do even if no one agreed with him. I've known a lot of people who have worked at Mercatus over the years, and that has been true of all of them (and, surprisingly to many, they're not all libertarian -- Mercatus has funded a lot of people and projects for stuff that doesn't reflect Koch views). Tyler himself is definitely not perfectly aligned with the Kochs' views on things, but he is very effective, which is why he's the president at Mercatus.
The conspiracist right's complex over Soros and the conspiracist left's complex over the Kochs are two sides of the same coin, with their own terrible book-length screeds to match.
I wouldn't dismiss his work simply based on that. It's not unusual for blog posts to have notes on how the content is related to the author's other works.
Not at all. The safer assumption is that HN readers here in this discussion today have never heard of him or MR. I've never heard of him, and I think I keep up pretty well in tech.
A number of award winners are already very accomplished. In this most recent cohort, there's a woman who's a professor at Brown, has a PhD from Harvard, and written multiple books.
It would be interesting to see how accomplished the award winners are and how early in their careers they received the award.
While it's true he will give grants to accomplished people, he also makes far more grants to smart young people (often from non-Western, lower income nations) that are _not_ accomplished, for things like "general career development". People like Byrne Hobart and David Perell launched their writing careers via EM. And even in the list you linked to, there's a 15 year old and a high school junior.
Regarding success rate, his explicit goal is to fund extremely ambitious people and projects that would otherwise struggle or not get funding at all. This could mean funding the most speculative or risky (or highly societally beneficial but lower financial return) ideas from already accomplished people or funding talented people that would struggle to get funding otherwise (due to age, access to capital, etc). I believe (and I think TC agrees) that there are likely many people and projects whose course could be substantially altered for the better if given access to a reasonably small amount of money early enough to convince the person to work on it full time.
By “success” I mean at curating talent, which the author claims Cowen is the best at in the world. It’s easy to recognize talent many years into someone’s career when they’ve accomplished a lot.
I’m curious what his record is like in finding people with talent who haven’t yet done much.
What a sensational title, it's so tech-focused and the article fetishizes smartness in a bizarre way.
There are talent curators in every single field, for instance from baseball, this reminds me of those old advisors in the movie Moneyball, who look at how people seem to be rather than using actual evidence of prior performance. Where is the quantification of TC's magical power? It's narrative, not numbers. The article doesn't address his failure rate or the bias of these selected stars getting a huge boost from a rich established individual.
Skepticism aside, I think we'd do well as a society to pull 18 year olds with a lot of promise out of college and directly into ventures for a year or two. They can always go back if they need to, but I question the wisdom of putting our best youth into a college system where their efforts are entirely hoop-jumping, self-promotional classes that contribute to a GPA but to no one else. We're effectively squandering their apprenticeship on grade values, not on projects or useful deliverables.
Am I the only one here who thinks TC knows nothing about many things and his main skill is putting himself out there?
I admire his range and understanding and use of the halo effect, but when he talks about some of the fields I know, I can't help but notice that he waves his hands more than those airfield attendants who tell pilots how to move runaway planes.
I glance at his blog on my RSS reader...he likes to talk and can talk intelligently. My (layperson) gist is that his economist posts are middling at best, but he is a decent consumer of art and culture at least
You make a good point, but I'd like to add an adverb: he can speak in a seemingly intelligent way about many topics.
Also, he is mostly a commentator, which is much easier than be a "creator" of something tangible, he is never put on the spot by anybody because he is TC and he has quick obscure comebacks that are challenging to address, like "I like Vietnamese cuisine", and he comes back with "but how has it changed since Vietnam moved to a more capitalistic society?". I mean, how come you answer that?
I am not hating on TC, he is a brilliant man, but for the life of me after his interviews (both as an interviewer and interviewee), I cannot remember a damn thing.
If an 18 year old shows enough promise to go succeed in ventures outside college, why would you think they would devolve to pointless hoop-jumping and grade grubbing in college?
These sorts of criticisms of college seem bizarrely paternalistic or maybe fatalistic, acting like people lose all sense of agency just because they’re taking classes or something. The reality is that college is just like the rest of life: you get out of it what you put into it. It’s possible to coast and get the sheepskin, sure, but lots of people coast outside of college too.
There are certain types of ventures in which we could expect an 18-year-old to find success absent a college education, yes. Those doors are not closed to college graduates, though, and many doors are opened through advanced education—not all of which lead to commercial ventures.
And then you put that 18 year old to work in those ventures, and at every turn he’s met with “what do you know, you’re just 18, why aren’t you in college if you’re so smart?”
One can argue that Dr. Jim Simons is the best curator of talent. Look at Quanta Magazine or Renaissance Technologies. Both places have exceptional people, and constantly produce good results. Rentech has beat the market for the past 30 years. Quanta Magazine has published many good articles that has been on HN's front page and have mentioned in Wired Magazine etc.
Can anyone comment on Cowen's economic/political view? Last I've heard he's kind of a dying breed of Hayek supporter, but looking at his wikipedia page - it seems like even he has adopted a much more sympathetic view towards bigger government.
Not to say anything about libertarian - I'm just curious.
He talks about "too much regulation is choking the economy" guy, but he really means "lack of equity" (as in immigration is unnecessarily hard, building regulation is insane, etc), FAA regulation on supersonic flight currently hinders innovation (because it's not noise based but speed based).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] threadAt least one of these you have to explicitly ask to be added to to be mentioned in. It's worthless as a measure of value, yet taken to be one by this person.
That's what more money than sense gets you, I guess: A worship of dilettantes and a reliance on marketers to make commercials to advertise every opportunity to you.
One of the most smartest people you'll ever read or speak to. It seems he has at least a modest understanding of important topics in almost any field you can mention, and an impressive mastery in a few dozen. From Brutalist architecture, tennis to Latin American art.
He talks and writes about politics, but rarely if ever is dogmatic or partisan. Has no problem admitting he was wrong about something, or that he doesn't know the answer (depressingly rare).
I highly recommend his blog and podcast. IMO the most underrated interviewer in the game. Each of his guests he researches deeply and always asks the most incisive, intelligent questions you wish you had thought of.
TC is fairly popular among the HN set but could always be more widely known.
On the contrary, he generally suggests that government and "experts" can analyze issues and devise appropriate "policies" (including climate changes, yep) for all of us.
I tried to ignore that for years, but the pattern continued so eventually I had to stop following him. More recently I heard - those interested may want to check his blog rather than believe my recollection - that he was in favor of strict lockdowns or mandatory vaccination (I can't remember which, but I wasn't surprised when I heard about it).
Sadly, the man is a statist.
Shouldn't be hard to verify, no? Have him pick 2N candidates, randomly select half that he can not announce publicly, talk to or otherwise influence (impossible to prevent entirely but "good enough" will suffice to establish a difference). Then look at how the two groups are doing some time down the line.
You can't improve what you can't measure.
But is the goal of these sorts of things often actually to select the best?
But if you want to do this sort of thing for some sort of "making the world a better place" reason... or want to actually truly select the best... you gotta test it!
And yes, this requires you to be very self-reflecting and open to the possibility of being wrong, but is it truly so hard to imagine that someone would rather know than not know?
It's easier to take him at his own word - the program is so effective because the audience is self selected:
> “I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are writing me. If I had too many not smart emails I would feel that I was doing something else wrong with what I’m writing.” … “The rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I’m lowering it just by talking about the program.”
Will this article disrupt that?
Ask yourself, do you think the person who invited you / hired you is stupid? Probably not, given the people around you smart and capable.
In this specific case, of course, finding people who are not yet accomplished is entirely the point.
Congrats on your selection.
For example, there was this teenager who was building CubeSats. All I did at that age was play World of Warcraft =D
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
Believing this would quickly kill every room as the people inside leave.
What it's really saying is that if you believe that you are the smartest person in the room, and you are there just to teach, as you have little to learn, that you need to be in a room where you really believe you have a lot to learn from the others there. This is true regardless of how much better, or worse, you happen to be.
I sure have seen rooms where almost everyone thought they were the smartest person in the room, and others where nobody thought they were the smartest. A common problem in startups is that you end up building the first room, when you really need to be building the second.
Well put. Thank you.
Please note that the corollary is finding a room that contains at least one person as smart as you are or smarter. If that seems too high a bar, you've got problems.
Everyone should listen to some episodes of Conversations with Tyler. I normally hate interview podcasts, but it is bar none the best one out there. It doesn't matter the topic - the questions he is able to hit his subjects with are amazing, nothing at all like how most interviews go.
Most of his episodes are great though.
The only people online who have a similarly thoughtful and generous spirit, in my direct experience, is Russ Roberts and Scott Alexander.
Prob reveals a lot about the media I consume (and my demo profile) but I am definitely open to others if there are more like these three out there.
“You learn about other cultures, you learn different points of view by refining your eye and you develop a skill that is extremely useful for judging other things and cracking cultural codes in other settings. It’s an education in market economics - art markets. Like how do you buy the best pictures in an area Haitian art, or how do you assemble a very good voodoo flag collection? How do you get artists in Mexico to do their best work for you? That’s a business problem that you need to solve.
You want experience at solving a broad diversity of problems, to heighten your aesthetic sense, to learn some real history, and to understand how some of the art world works, surround yourself with beauty.
And you should buy it for the love of the art, and try to find that which other people have not really found or appreciated yet. It’s just like the world of ideas right? It is the world of ideas. It just costs more to play in it in terms of upfront dollar commitments.” [Tyler Cowen: Production Function. David Perrell, North Star Podcast.]
Relying on markets and the opinions of others may be effective in determining current economic value, but it is not a fruitful approach for finding "talent", broadly defined. Contemporary art is an excellent place to observe this phenomenon; there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value." The art market is a fascinating thing, but make no mistake, the most popular artists are not the most "talented", by whatever definition of talent you may have.
"Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values."
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Wait, so how do you determine this "aesthetic value" if not by how much people are willing to work to acquire it?
Your personal opinion? Some authority figure? Maths?
Truly answering your question would take a long time, but a short version might be something like: the collective opinions of a diverse group of highly informed and experienced (not necessarily educated as in a university) individuals. But that's just one approach and there are many others.
Even then, anything is probably superior to using monetary value as equivalent to anything other than what the market currently prices it as. I certainly don't think the most expensive painting is the most beautiful one, although it may be not be totally uncorrelated.
If you're interested in these kinds of questions, definitely look into the philosophical field of aesthetics.
And no I wouldn’t say you have no taste. Most aestheticians throughout (global) history would likely dislike that building. It’s only a recent phenomenon that such styles became so prevalent, largely out of ignorance or rejection of previous things.
Since the modern web is terrible, I was confronted with a pop-up dialog in Swedish (I assume) which prevented seeing the image
A sibling comment to yours pointed out a critical flaw in using price as a measure: it gives different people very unequally sized votes.
Measuring instead in something like logarithmic uttiles would instead give all people a similarly-sized vote.
My problem with all measures of aesthetics that do not give everyone an equal vote (like your proposal for a committee of experts) is the fat selection bias inherent.
I can think of no way to produce that committee that doesn't involve self-reinforcing feedback loops that bias the committee toward a local optimum that doesn't actually reflect the standards of all of humanity.
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But. Then again, maybe this is one of those situations Weisberg talks about where trying to find the "main effect", i.e. the aggregate opinion of all humans, is meaningless.
Maybe it's more interesting to find out what specific groups of people think, and then I'm sure a committee of such people works. But one has to be up-front about what is then measured.
https://iep.utm.edu/aestheti/
If you don't mind reading a dictionary, The Dictionary of Aesthetics by Dabney Townsend is also a good overview of many different ideas and terms.
Otherwise, I am a big fan of Japanese aesthetics, which is much more "in the world" than the more abstract Western philosophical approach. For this, I really recommend the short essay A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie.
Also, one of my favorite novels is My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It is about Ottoman miniature painting and has extensive discussion on aesthetics, painting, and similar topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
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On your other comment, I might agree with Weisberg that we aren't really going for an aggregate opinion of everyone. Instead, we need a way to measure the opinions of a diverse group of experts, whatever that might mean specifically.
A good analogue might be military strategy. If we were to ask "Who was the best general of all time?", we'd likely want to ask military historians (academic experts), actual generals (experiential experts), as well as amateur enthusiasts that are extremely knowledgeable but don't have the right credentials. We'd also probably want various other groups of people like soldiers, politicians, (resurrected) great generals like Napoleon or Hannibal themselves, etc.
As long as we had a decent method for validating membership of these different groups, I think we'd get a reasonably decent answer.
In terms of architecture, this expert-only approach might have some limitations and we would need to add the townspeople and library readers to our analysis. But this is more because buildings are something practical used in the world and not just art in a gallery.
The art world is notorious for being a tax avoidance scheme, on top of money laundering and all sorts of other related activities. Tying market value and aesthetic value in the art world makes about as much sense as introducing the concept of "aesthetic value" when talking about Apple's stock price.
What about introducing it when talking about GameStop's stock price?
I realize this is unsatisfying to many, but there really is no other choice. A strict empiricist has no way of knowing whether or not art is good. In fact, a purely empirical worldview will find it hard to have art in it at all. There's no way to distinguish subjective from arbitrary.
If you do accept that taste exists and that subjective != arbitrary, we can move forward and discuss it without expecting externally verifiable tests for it. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't believe that art exists at all... or that we can gain any knowledge of it if it does.
Substituting price or popularity for quality is redundant. Just think in terms of price or popularity, and forget about quality. Calling popularity quality just because it's easier to define or measure muddies things up, whether or not you believe in taste.
Yes, what's wrong with that? With a little katharsis mixed in, of course.
Because that's how art is sold today.
Moreover, it doesn't even work as a relative scale. If Jeff Bezos spends half his fortune on one art piece, he is still one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. He won't be materially affected by this in any way. If I spend half my savings on an art piece, that puts me at a substantial risk (2 catastrophes and I'm broke).
Basically, Jeff has little opportunity cost to spending 50 billion, while I have enormous opportunity cost to spending 50,000. But Jeff doesn't work 1 million times as much as I do for that.
Over what time period?
> Your personal opinion?
Of course. It’s entirely possible to value something you personally cannot afford.
This may mean that he's applying a economist's mindset, like an engineer might apply an engineering mindset... but either might be besides the point. More about choice of method and language than substance.
Tyler calls his study of the humanities “cracking cultural codes,” and he highlights this as the most “importantly novel” activity he practices.
I'm suggesting that this may be besides the point. I don't really know, but I suspect that while being an economist lends a lot of form, it might not be all that important to substance... or less important than other things, even though it's highly visible.
For example, Tyler will try to quantify desires with money. How much would you have to pay me to do this, or how much would I pay to do it. That's a very economist-ey quirk, but I'm not sure it changes outcomes as much as it might seem.
Re: art, I think the identity points that matter is that Tyler isn't an artist. What he is isn't necessarily all that important. He's a pretty weird guy, and a lot of his instincts are probably more artist-like than economist-like anyway.
Art appreciation extends beyond mere aesthetic value. For example we are able to create pottery that is far more aesthetically pleasing than ancient times. Yet a rare, archeological pot is probably going to fetch far more value than a piece from your neighborhood artist who probably has far more knowledge about pottery than his ancient equivalent.
There's something very strange I've noticed in contemporary art, that in the last 20-30 years the value of talent, hard work, and aesthetics have dimished massively in critics and influencers eyes.
I don't think it's made the world a better place. It's almost like creating anti-art is now trendy and popular, creating aesthetic art is seen as boring and old. Chaos is preferred over order, destroying and standing up to old structures is seen as art, not building on previous knowledge.
Now I know there is a lot of value in rebelling, I rebelled a lot myself, but I think it's gone way overboard. You need a balance of rebellion and the old. Rebellion by itself is destructive over the long run.
- Intense curiosity
- Deep knowledge of economics
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Risk taking bias - e.g. focus on MR was a significant risk for him
No surprise that he's exceptionally good at identifying and backing talent in this way.
I actually think the curiosity and risk taking bias are key here.
Well, publishing articles with hyperbolic titles seems like painting a big, glowing target for status-seekers to come and ruin Cowen's signal-to-noise ratio.
I say this because back when I used to frequent Marginal Revolution, I found that there was a good deal of self-promotion of Cowen's work in the website - for example, he would link an interesting news story and provide minimal commentary, but then would link his tangentially related research. I understand his incentive for doing this, but the amount of self-promotion was enough to annoy me and make me stop reading.
Years later, I attended a presentation that Cowen gave that was ostensibly on his book the Great Stagnation, but in reality it turned out to be a demonstration of some online learning venture he was bankrolling at the time.
He's a smart and productive guy, no doubt, but my (anecdotal) experiences make me wonder about what is behind an article like this.
Either way, the people that came to the presentation didn't come to hear about the product he was promoting - we wanted, at least I wanted, to hear the ideas in his book. Instead we got the old switcheroo.
The conspiracist right's complex over Soros and the conspiracist left's complex over the Kochs are two sides of the same coin, with their own terrible book-length screeds to match.
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures+winners
A number of award winners are already very accomplished. In this most recent cohort, there's a woman who's a professor at Brown, has a PhD from Harvard, and written multiple books.
It would be interesting to see how accomplished the award winners are and how early in their careers they received the award.
Regarding success rate, his explicit goal is to fund extremely ambitious people and projects that would otherwise struggle or not get funding at all. This could mean funding the most speculative or risky (or highly societally beneficial but lower financial return) ideas from already accomplished people or funding talented people that would struggle to get funding otherwise (due to age, access to capital, etc). I believe (and I think TC agrees) that there are likely many people and projects whose course could be substantially altered for the better if given access to a reasonably small amount of money early enough to convince the person to work on it full time.
I’m curious what his record is like in finding people with talent who haven’t yet done much.
There are talent curators in every single field, for instance from baseball, this reminds me of those old advisors in the movie Moneyball, who look at how people seem to be rather than using actual evidence of prior performance. Where is the quantification of TC's magical power? It's narrative, not numbers. The article doesn't address his failure rate or the bias of these selected stars getting a huge boost from a rich established individual.
Skepticism aside, I think we'd do well as a society to pull 18 year olds with a lot of promise out of college and directly into ventures for a year or two. They can always go back if they need to, but I question the wisdom of putting our best youth into a college system where their efforts are entirely hoop-jumping, self-promotional classes that contribute to a GPA but to no one else. We're effectively squandering their apprenticeship on grade values, not on projects or useful deliverables.
I admire his range and understanding and use of the halo effect, but when he talks about some of the fields I know, I can't help but notice that he waves his hands more than those airfield attendants who tell pilots how to move runaway planes.
- Karl Popper
Also, he is mostly a commentator, which is much easier than be a "creator" of something tangible, he is never put on the spot by anybody because he is TC and he has quick obscure comebacks that are challenging to address, like "I like Vietnamese cuisine", and he comes back with "but how has it changed since Vietnam moved to a more capitalistic society?". I mean, how come you answer that?
I am not hating on TC, he is a brilliant man, but for the life of me after his interviews (both as an interviewer and interviewee), I cannot remember a damn thing.
These sorts of criticisms of college seem bizarrely paternalistic or maybe fatalistic, acting like people lose all sense of agency just because they’re taking classes or something. The reality is that college is just like the rest of life: you get out of it what you put into it. It’s possible to coast and get the sheepskin, sure, but lots of people coast outside of college too.
There are certain types of ventures in which we could expect an 18-year-old to find success absent a college education, yes. Those doors are not closed to college graduates, though, and many doors are opened through advanced education—not all of which lead to commercial ventures.
https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Identify-Energizers-Creatives-...
Not to say anything about libertarian - I'm just curious.
He talks about "too much regulation is choking the economy" guy, but he really means "lack of equity" (as in immigration is unnecessarily hard, building regulation is insane, etc), FAA regulation on supersonic flight currently hinders innovation (because it's not noise based but speed based).