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Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

kulesa.substack.com

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Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#101

Post by mns »

legitster wrote: post #13

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.

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".

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#102

Post by shafyy »

freewilly1040 wrote: post #18
shafyy wrote: post #10

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. Congrats on your selec…

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

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#103

Post by zpeti »

keiferski wrote: post #14

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 - a…

> 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.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#104

Post by Matticus_Rex »

dv_dt wrote: post #94
Matticus_Rex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#105

Post by zepto »

kqr wrote: post #37
keiferski wrote: post #14

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 - a…

> there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value." 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?

> if not by how much people are willing to work to acquire it?

Over what time period?

> Your personal opinion?

Of course. It’s entirely possible to value something you personally cannot afford.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#106

Post by webmaven »

hibikir wrote: post #90
thaumasiotes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

> you need to be in a room where you really believe you have a lot to learn from the others there.

Well put. Thank you.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#107

Post by webmaven »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #57
webmaven wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really felt out of place, since everyone else seemed so much more accomplished and smart. If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room .

> 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.

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.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#108

Post by eine_zwei »

borroka wrote: post #63
Dumblydorr wrote: post #51

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 artic…

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.

No, you're not.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#109

Post by niyikiza »

felipe_ii wrote: post #24

I wonder if this article is an example of the submarine coming to surface ( http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html ). 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 und…

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.

Re: Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent

#110

Post by pas »

paulpauper wrote: post #20
calcsam wrote: post #15

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.

Could you expand on (or link to) that healthcare re-framing? Thanks!
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