Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved his position on AI in public more than once.
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5 of Tyler Cowen's claims fit 4 mental models. Most often: Incentives, Emergence, Second-order thinking.
Look at what people are rewarded for; it explains more behaviour than what they say, your own included.
Their wordsThe policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.
Their wordsThe truth is that moral hazard concerns very often are worse with government programs than with markets.
Much of what people do is a message about themselves, and a signal is believed only when it costs something to send.
Their wordsThe signaling-empathy answers I find quite uninteresting, and I think a lot of my listeners do, too. Yet people will just keep on doing this, and I get frustrated. Then I think, “Well, Tyler, you should turn a bit more against empathy for this reason.” And I think that’s correct.
Whole systems do things none of their parts do, and nobody has to design that order for it to appear.
Ask "and then what?": follow a decision past its first effect to the ones that come after.
Their wordsA very dynamic economy probably will be very good at building lots of robots cheaply, which may make us more rather than less likely to end up in Malthusian dilemmas.