Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Arthur Brooks no published score: no usable exchanges on raw tape, and a fair score needs 8+ · coarse estimate ≈4.0/5 from 3 produced feed exchanges record → ← everyone
Every exchange below was scored with names hidden, four dimensions each from 1 to 5.
An exchange's score is 0.30·directness + 0.30·coherence + 0.25·precision + 0.15·compression.
The published score averages the raw tape exchange scores and shrinks small samples toward the
cohort mean, so five great answers can't beat twenty good ones. Produced feed rows count only
toward coarse estimates, never toward a full score.
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q immigration, and other topics in this episode, but first we begin by quickly touching on his background and where he began since Arthur will be passing on the baton next summer at AEI after a decade leading it. How does one go from being a professional horn player to going to Rand, to getting the PhD in economics, to getting to the AEI? I'm sorry, in case university to AEI.
A Most people that are listening to us have some weird background. They've tried a bunch of different things, and that's the new America. When I was 19, I dropped out of college, you know, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs. And, uh, and I went on the road playing music. I played chamber music for a long time. I played a couple of years with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird, and I wound up in the Barcelona Symphony. When I was in Barcelona, I got completely interested in math, in statistics, in political science, and especially in economics, and so I started taking a lot of economics classes, and I found it was kind of like a crystal ball. I could describe so much of behavior. I mean, it's not perfect, but I found that it was sort of changing the way that I saw the world, and so I decided that's what I wanted to do, and I stopped being a musician, went back to school, finished my bachelor's and my master's and PhD, and Found when I was in academia that I could even go back to the think tank world and have a lot of impact in public policy, and that's why I wound up at AEI.
AI assessment note: “and that's why I wound up at AEI.”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q It's also true of the displacement of manufacturing jobs and people who no longer have jobs due to automation, and yet automation is also creating a better life for many in the long term. How do we then reconcile the short-term displacement and the fact that some of those people will never work again or that there may be new skills? How do we
A Well, to begin with, we have to make sure that we're not having the same conversation 10 years from now. That means we, we actually need to have policies. The most important thing that we need to do in terms of policy in this country to, to, to start solving this problem is an education system that meets our needs. I did a lot of work in mathematical modeling and AI before I came to the American Enterprise Institute, and I have to say that I thought that the natural trajectory of things was everybody who was going to do work in, I don't know, genetic algorithms and neural nets, but no. The future of the economy is everybody being needed in the things that actually are necessary. So here's what I want you to consider with me for a second. We have very high rates of youth unemployment in the United States, especially for those who haven't finished high school or didn't go to college. At the same time, we have millions of open jobs in the skilled trades. Why is this? Because the gold standard for work right now is going to college and being a knowledge worker. The American Welding Association, I just learned this, There are 300,000 skilled welding jobs that are open today. We can't find people to do them. These are high paying jobs. I mean, I talked to a guy who did a welding training when he was in prison, that his first day walking out of prison he had a 58,000 dollar job offer …
AI assessment note: “The most important thing that we need to do in terms of policy... is an education system”
Answered produced feed
D 4 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.60
Q It's a phrase I actually don't like, the phrase, because I don't even know what that means, and it feels like a buzzword, but what was that to you? What did that mean?
A Well, I'm very interested in the human performance movement, and as a behavioral economist, I'm particularly interested in the research that shows how people can optimize their own life. And there's a huge amount of it. It's in the leadership literature. It's in the social psychology literature. It's in the literature on metaphysics and applied philosophy. It's just all over the place where you find people that are looking for a different way of solving old problems, which is incredibly entrepreneurial. I mean, what you find is the most inflecting entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley. That's what they've done too. Well, we can do that with respect to human performance as well. It's a frontier of research to look at how we can use ourselves in our lives as laboratories.
AI assessment note: “a frontier of research to look at how we can use ourselves in our lives”
