Category: Philosophy

My Shakespeare and literature podcast with Henry Oliver

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio and transcript, here is the episode summary:

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn’t love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare’s fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout.

Excerpt:

Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.

Tyler He’s maybe the best thinker.

And:

Henry Sure. So you’re saying Juliet doesn’t love Romeo?

Tyler Neither loves the other.

Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.

Tyler That’s the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.

Henry and I may at some point do a podcast on a single Shakespeare play.

Questions that are rarely asked

by  Tyler Cowen in

“Which do you think is the best symphony which you never have heard?”

It used to be the first two symphonies of Carl Nielsen, but yesterday I heard them.  They are good, probably not great, but in any case I never had heard them before.  I have heard more Haydn symphonies than you might think (all of them), so for me the answer is not one of those.

Perhaps now it is something by Lutoslawski?  I only know two of them, and I like them.  What else does this margin hold?  And how long will I need to explore it?

This question gets at two issues.  First, how do you assess matters you do not really know?  What kinds of evidence do you bring to bear on answering this question?

Second, why do you stop at one margin rather than another?  Why don’t you know whatever you think is the best symphony you have never heard?  Was your last attempt in that direction such a miserable failure?  Are symphonies really so bad?  I think not.  No matter who you are, there are still some good ones.

So what is stopping you?

Is there an intermediate position on immigration?

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is a common view, especially on the political right, that we should be quite open to highly skilled immigrants, and much less open to less skilled immigrants.  Increasingly I am wondering whether this is a stable ideological equilibrium.

To an economist, it is easy to see the difference between skilled and less skilled migrants.  Their wages are different, resulting tax revenues are different, and social outcomes are different, among other factors.  Economists can take this position and hold it in their minds consistently and rather easily (to be clear, I have greater sympathies for letting in more less skilled immigrants than this argument might suggest, but for the time being that is not the point).

The fact that economists’ intuitions can sustain that distinction does not mean that public discourse can sustain that distinction.  For instance, perhaps “how much sympathy do you have for foreigners?” is the main carrier of the immigration sympathies of the public.  If they have more sympathies for foreigners, they will be relatively pro-immigrant for both the skilled and unskilled groups.  If they have fewer sympathies for foreigners, they will be less sympathetic to immigration of all kinds.  Do not forget the logic of negative contagion.

You also can run a version of this argument with “legal vs. illegal immigration” being the distinction at hand.

Increasingly, I have the fear that “general sympathies toward foreigners” is doing much of the load of the work here.  This is one reason, but not the only one, why I am uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric against less skilled immigrants.  It may also be the path toward a tougher immigration policy more generally.

I hope I am wrong about this.  Right now the stakes are very high.

In the meantime, speak and write about other people nicely!  Even if you think they are damaging your country in some significant respects.  You want your principles here to remain quite circumscribed, and not to turn into anti-foreigner sentiment more generally.

Why you should be talking with gpt about philosophy

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve talked with Gpt (as I like to call it) about Putnam and Quine on conceptual schemes. I’ve talked with it about Ζeno’s paradoxes. I’ve talked with it about behaviourism, causality, skepticism, supervenience, knowledge, humour, catastrophic moral horror, the container theory of time, and the relation between different conceptions of modes and tropes. I tried to get it to persuade me to become an aesthetic expressivist. I got it to pretend to be P.F. Strawson answering my objections to Freedom and Resentment. I had a long chat with it about the distinction between the good and the right.

…And my conclusion is that it’s now really good at philosophy…Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic. More than that, I’ve had many philosophical discussions with professional philosophers that were much less philosophical than my recent chats with Gpt.

Here is the full Rebecca Lowe Substack on the topic.  There are also instructions for how to do this well, namely talk with Gpt about philosophical issues, including ethics:

In many ways, the best conversation I’ve had with Gpt, so far, involved Gpt arguing against itself and its conception of me, as both Nozick1 (the Robert Nozick who sadly died in 2002) and Nozick2 (the imaginary Robert Nozick who is still alive today, and who according to Gpt has developed into a hardcore democrat), on the topic of catastrophic moral horror.

And as many like to say, this is the worst it ever will be…

The epistemics of drone incursions

by  Tyler Cowen in

I do not pretend to know what is going on, nor do I think it is aliens.  I do read:

The sprawling Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio is the latest military installation to report mysterious drones flying over its airspace, The War Zone has learned.

“I can confirm small aerial systems were spotted over Wright Patterson between Friday night and Saturday morning,” base spokesman Bob Purtiman told The War Zone on Sunday in response to our questions about the sightings. “Today leaders have determined that they did not impact base residents, facilities, or assets. The Air Force is taking all appropriate measures to safeguard our installations and residents.”

The drones “ranged in sizes and configurations,” Purtiman said. “Our units are working with local authorities to ensure the safety of base personnel, facilities, and assets.”

The airspace over the base was closed for a while.  My point here is to beware self-styled “debunkers,” who often acquire excess ownership in a schtick.  Most of all I mean figures such as Mick West.  It is easy enough to find stupid claims about drones (especially in New Jersey?) and counter them.  The better way to proceed is to confront the strongest claims head on.  The head of DHS is mystified, and a classified security briefing was held for Congress.  Those are puzzles we should try to figure out.  There is at least a reasonable probability that something interesting is going on here.  Beware debunkers, very often they are not your epistemic friends.

Addendum: Here is an update from a man who receives high-level intelligence briefings.

My Conversation with the excellent Paula Byrne

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen’s writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh’s hidden warmth, Paula’s strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more.

This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time.  But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:

COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?

BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]

COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.

BYRNE: Give me the context of that.

COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.

BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.

COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?

BYRNE: Yes, we can.

COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.

BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.

COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?

Definitely recommended, one of my favorite episodes in some while.  And of course we got around to discussing Paul McCartney and Liverpool…

*A Boy’s Own Story*

by  Tyler Cowen in

By Edmund White, I enjoyed this paragraph from the preface:

In A Boy’s Own Story I touched on all the themes of my youth: the exaggerated consolations of the imagination; the sexy but crushing teenage culture of the 1950s; the importance of Buddhism, books and psychoanalysis to my development; my first contacts with bohemianism, the sole milieu where homosexuality was tolerated; and finally my cult of physical beauty.  In recent years politically correct gay critics have taken me to task for my *looksism.”  I never respond, but if I were to I’d say “Put the blame on Plato, who originated the seductive if unwholesome idea that physical beauty is a promise of Beauty, indistinguishable from Truth and Goodness.”  All artists are responsive to beauty in any form it appears.

How did “looksism” get turned into “lookism“?

Noah Smith presents Ryan Oprea

by  Tyler Cowen in

But a new paper by Ryan Oprea challenges the idea that we even need something like Prospect Theory at all. Oprea hypothesizes that a lot of the seemingly “irrational” experimental behaviors are really just due to the excessive complexity of the task they’re being asked to do. He does an experiment where he takes away all the risk in the decision — there are no probabilities and no losses involved. One option just gives you more money than the other. And yet experimental subjects still make mistakes that look a lot like the “irrational” choices they make in Kahneman-type experiments. Eric Crampton has a good blog post summarizing the details of Oprea’s experiment.

So it’s possible that a lot of what looks like “irrationality” is just human beings being unable to deal with complex calculations. That doesn’t kill the idea of behavioral economics — it just means we need different theories about why people don’t act like homo economicus.

Here is the link to Noah.

Assisted dying in the UK

by  Tyler Cowen in

I would say that overall I am more suspicious of “assisted dying” policies than are many of my libertarian friends.  I am fine with legalizing suicide, but I get nervous when a state — especially a less than fully competent, fiscally strapped state — enters the picture with so much influence over the proceedings.  In the longer term, no matter how the legislation is initially written, what will be the incentives of that state?  What will be the incentives of family members and legal guardians?

That said, I do recognize that as medical technology and life-saving techniques advance, something has to give.  We can’t just keep tens of millions of people hooked up to life support for decades.

I do not have any “top down” way of resolving all of the difficult moral and practical issues here.  I will simply note that the returns to federalism have risen.  Different American states can try out different policies, as indeed they do, and we can see what is happening and judge accordingly.

I believe this point remains underrated.  As technology advances, and the world changes more rapidly, the returns to federalism rise.  We are coming off a long period when the returns to federalism were relatively low.

I am more optimistic about England than many people, but this is one of my worries.  Devolution doesn’t quite do the same, but rather means that for anything England does, two other polities are likely to choose something even worse.

My Conversation with Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s *Life and Fate*

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Russ and I agreed to read the book in its entirety and then discuss it.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Russ and Tyler cover Grossman’s life and the historical context of Life and Fate, its themes of war, totalitarianism, freedom, and fate, the novel’s polyphonic structure and large cast of characters, the parallels between fascism and communism, the idea of “senseless kindness” as a counter to systemic evil, the symbolic importance of motherhood, the psychology of confession and loyalty under totalitarian systems, Grossman’s literary influences including Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dante, and Stendhal, individual resilience and moral compromises, the survival of the novel despite Soviet censorship, artificial intelligence and the dehumanization of systems, the portrayal of scientific discovery and its moral dilemmas, the ethical and emotional tensions in the novel, the anti-fanatical tone and universal humanism of the book, Grossman’s personal life and connections to its themes, and the novel’s enduring relevance and complexity.

Here is one bit from me:

COWEN: Amongst Soviet authors, he is the GOAT, one could say, to refer to our earlier episode. But this, to me, is one of the very few truly universal novels. The title itself, Life and Fate — it is about life and fate, but the novel is about so much more. It’s about war. It’s about slavery. It’s about love, motherhood, fatherhood, childbirth, rape, friendship, science, politics. How many novels, if any, can you think of that have all of those worlds in them in an interesting and insightful manner? Very few.

The one that comes closest to it is, in fact, his model. That’s Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a three-word title with an and in the middle and two important concepts. They’re both about war. They’re both about the invasions of Russia or the USSR. There’s a central family in both stories. The notion of what is fate or destiny is highly important to Tolstoy, as it is to Grossman, though they have different points of view.

Napoleon plays a significant role in War and Peace. In Life and Fate, Hitler and Stalin make actual appearances in the novel, which I find shocking when I read it, like, here they are on the page, and it’s actually somewhat plausible. So, he’s modeling this, I think, after War and Peace. He actually pulls it off, which is a miracle. I think it is a novel comparable in quality and scope and import to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which is sometimes called the greatest novel ever. So that is a pretty amazing achievement.

And on some non-book issues:

COWEN: I think I should have said it’s a bimodal distribution, that you go one way or another. Look at it this way: In the simplest Bayesian model, your views should be a random walk, that the recent evolution of your views shouldn’t predict where you’ll end up tomorrow. But that’s not the case, really, with anyone that I’ve ever met. There’s some kind of trend in your views. You’re either getting more fanatical, getting more moderate, getting more religious, more or less something.

And that, to me, is one of the most interesting facts about human belief, is how hard it is to find belief as a random walk. So, what’s wrong with all of us? If you’re getting more moderate all the time, that’s wrong too. That’s a funny kind of, you could say, almost fanaticism, where you ought to say, “Well, I see the trend so I’m just going to leap to where I ought to be.” Then the next day, maybe 50 percent chance I’ll take a step back toward being more dogmatic or less moderate. But again, that’s not what we see from the moderates either.

ROBERTS: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it’s really convenient to have a system, gives you something to shove into the box. You’ve got this black box that you take the world’s events and you’ve decided how they should be processed. Then something new comes along, and you know how to deal with that because you’ve got this box; you’ve got all these great examples from the past.

At some point for me, I just started thinking that maybe the box doesn’t work all the time. I think a lot of people love the box. It’s a great source of comfort, whether it’s religion or ideology or other things. Maybe there’s just something peculiar about me. When you’re younger, certainty is deeply comforting because the world’s a bit too complicated to deal with. It still is, but I’m just less certain.

COWEN: There’s also a more charitable interpretation of what you’re describing. Think of yourself as working through problems, which is fine. Working through problems takes some time. You can’t every day pick up a new problem. The problems you’re working through as you — I wouldn’t say solve them, but as you somewhat make progress on them — that’s going to give you some persistence in the deltas of how your beliefs change.

I’m not sure — the pure Bayesian model might just be wrong. It’s so far from actual human practice. Maybe we shouldn’t just damn humans for not meeting it, but realize there are structures to how you work through things, and they are going to imply certain trends that go on for periods of time.

Recommended, obviously.