The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Cowen: Giving someone a book as a gift is slightly cruel
“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading. It's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”
Cowen: Rational individual choices for safety make society collectively worse off
“So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all wors…”
Cowen: America exhausted the low-hanging fruit of early industrial technologies
“We exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines and electricity and communications, and that, that's all to the better, but we've now entered a world where people find it hard to imagine a future very different fr…”
Tyler Cowen: Complacent societies cannot survive indefinitely without restoring economic dynamism
“But that said, a country cannot remain complacent forever. And I argue that eventually, you know, something has to give, you need a way to pay the bills, you need dynamism again, and you start seeing disruptions in your complacent life.”
Cowen: Parents should expose teenagers to high-quality adult role models
“Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They'…”
Cowen: Simple, boring digital habits beat ambitious tech as killer apps
“I think my intuition is people like simple, boring things, ah, much more than you might imagine. I mean, people just love spending time on Facebook and sending back and forth short, silly, or not very informative messages. And that's been the killer app for so…”
Cowen: Epistemic modesty delivers higher returns than high IQ
“Having good judgment there is becoming more important than just being like the smartest person or having the highest IQ. So a kind of epistemic modesty, I think, is showing much higher returns than it used to.”
Cowen: Finish only one in ten books you start reading
“Classics I read cover to cover. Almost by definition of a classic. Most books I don't finish. Very good books I finish. Maybe one book in 10 I'll finish. But I don't mean that as any slight to the books. You've always got to think, Well, you know, chapter seve…”
Cowen: Giving someone a book is often a slightly cruel act
“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading, it's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”
Cowen: Cumulative reading volume is what enables fast reading
“The more you've read, the more you know what's coming in the books you're reading, so the easier and quicker it is to read them.”
Cowen: People dismiss others primarily to feel superior and in control
“I think both, but mostly the latter. People want to feel good about themselves. They want a kind of easy path to virtue, to truth, to feeling in control. We love to feel somewhat in control.”
Tyler Cowen: Capturing attention is hardest among high-income earners
“Of course, it's much harder to get everyone's attention. Most of all, people who have high incomes because there are so many demands on their time, but there's your email flow, there's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's being texted.”
Cowen: Media competition rewards authentic, niche-focused creators over incumbents
“A lot of media companies, of course, have lost out, so it rewards people, Who in some way are authentic, or dedicated, or can target a niche, and do something really interesting.”
Cowen: Global scale expands economic returns to scarce resources
“By a global setting where you can sell to billions of people across more than a hundred countries, and that really will increase those rewards to the scarce factors.”
Cowen: Expose teenagers to quality adult friends as external role models
“Expose your child in teen years to as many of your friends who might be possible role models as possible. Like at some margin, they're just not going to listen to you anymore. They're not going to watch your behavior anymore. They know what you're about. They'…”
Cowen: Modern managers need philosophical knowledge about human motivation
“As more people become more specialized, there's a separate class who become more synthetic and less generalized and more almost like philosophers. The manager is like a philosopher. They need to understand the human condition and
What motivates people?
Which p…”
Cowen: Books lose their world-shaking transformative power as you age
“When you're young, it's quite easy to read books that will shake everything you know, and those are the quake books. So for me, you know, a quake book was reading Friedrich A. Hayek. A quake book was reading the early science fiction I read in my life. A quake…”
Cowen: Source evaluation is a vital skill, yet most people do not improve
“If you're going to be a generalist, one of the best things to be a generalist in is evaluating the quality of sources in your Twitter feed, online, everywhere. That is so important, and it's skyrocketing in significance. Most people, they're not getting that m…”
Cowen: The 'devalue and dismiss' intellectual habit severely impedes learning
“There's an intellectual move, which I call devalue and dismiss. And you know, try not to do devalue and dismiss. You learn much less. And it's always justified, right? Again, unless it's Magnus Carlsen playing chess, or maybe a computer program playing chess, …”
Cowen: Trying to prove yourself right in arguments is usually a mistake
“I would say on average you're right less than half the time because there's so many fights where both sides are wrong. So trying to be right or establishing being right or proving being right is usually a mistake. Most of the time you're wrong, and it's hard t…”
Cowen: Intellectual improvement requires actively confronting personal analytical errors
“You want to really figure out what are your mistakes. You're like, most of the time, not making the best chess move, intellectually speaking. And if you face up to that, you'll improve. If not, at some point, you'll ossify, and you can play devalue and dismiss…”
Cowen: Global demand for safe assets keeps US rates artificially low
“And I think those rates staying so low, Is a sign that there's all this wealth out there in the world, Russia, China, but not really that many safe places to put it. So they buy us government securities, which is perfectly understandable, but it lowers our rat…”
Cowen: Successful saving requires dogmatic, rule-based personal finance systems
“I think the people who save well have methods and systems almost like a religion.”
Cowen: Incremental learning compounds over decades to create massive intellectual advantages
“Another way to think about it is the value of compound interest. I refer to it as the value of compound learning. Like, just keep on learning. Let the years pile up in your favor. Learn X percent a year. It will compound and stay alive on this earth, and maybe…”