I found the Tim Ferriss/Tyler Cowen podcast very worthwhile, probably more than you will. Points that struck me were:
–Tyler talks about economics as a branch of anthropology.
–Tyler says that he is very even-tempered and rarely unhappy.
–Although it is structured as Tim interviewing Tyler, about 2/3 of the way through, Tyler turns the tables and starts interviewing Tim. One of Tyler’s questions is “What is your theory of you?”
This led me to think that
1. There is a tendency for introverts or guys who are on the spectrum to become anthropologists. My anthropological theory of this is that everyone needs to understand other people in order to get along in the world. Some people are born with or quickly develop instincts for doing that, and they don’t have to think about it much. Those of us who start out with deficits in that area will compensate for those deficits by developing coping strategies. We use our conscious minds to try to figure out what makes human beings tick in general and what makes particular human beings tick. To the extent that we are systemizers, we tend to prefer economics or anthropology to psychology.
2. My theory of me is that I grew up with some innate introversion compounded by an absence of siblings. I had a lot of cognitive ability, which I used to try to acquire social skills intellectually. I became an economist/psychologist/anthropologist/sociologist/political scientist out of necessity. I suspect something similar of Ferriss, of Tyler, of Robin Hanson, of Scott Alexander, . . .
3. Like Tyler, I think that I am almost always in a good mood. Even when I am depressed, I am not sad, if that makes any sense. At the low end of my personal Minsky cycle I lack creativity and energy, but I am still happy. My blog persona is much crankier than I am in real life.
4. Tyler says that it is important to make people feel good about themselves. I agree intellectually, but I have a strong urge to challenge people when I think they are wrong. Even though I know that writing a negative book review is like telling a new mother that she has an ugly baby, I still do it. Tyler will not. If he says that a book “arrived in my pile” or that he “liked it but didn’t finish it,” I infer that it sucked. When I read a bad book, or a bad blog post, the only way I can restrain myself is to self-regulate and avoid commenting. That fails when I am commissioned to review a book and I don’t feel I can turn down the request (more often, I will turn down the request). Or occasionally, as with Deaths of Despair or Phishing for Phools, I feel compelled to shout that the Nobel Laureate wears no clothes.
5. Tyler is currently fascinated by the problem of discovering and developing talent. When I was a middle manager at Freddie Mac, that is the aspect of the job that gave me the most satisfaction, by far. Whenever another department hired one of my staff away from me at a big salary increase, I loved it, feeling that it validated my talent-development skills. The best was when I brought someone in as a financial analyst in Financial Research. This was over the mild objections of an HR person, who complained that the young man had no finance background. Within a year, he was hired away by the Corporate Finance department, and he kept getting promotions (way above me), ultimately becoming the head of a different department with a couple hundred people and a ton of profit-loss responsibility.
And rarely excessively happy; there are two sides to this even-tempered coin. Cowen appears to be anti-bipolar (I’m making that up) and I was struck by his self-disclosure about not relating to people expressing extreme happiness.
I listened to this podcast last Sunday. Tim Ferriss questioning Tyler Cowen was an exercise in frustration; an hour’s worth, if I remember correctly. The final 30 or so minutes, when “Tyler turns the tables” is much better but I’m not sure this is an absolute measure or relative to the painful first 2/3rds.
I wish a true systemizer could come up with a technique, maybe a set of questions, that could tease out the “theory of you” for random people. There is something very different about Tyler’s brain compared to my own and my failure to understand the difference keeps me listening to horrible interviews hoping for a glimmer of insight. Regardless, Cowen is an infovore extraordinaire and his main contribution to my life is his curation of interesting links and books. Perhaps this is why Tim Ferris also follows him because I really couldn’t discern any commonality between these two men otherwise. Maybe its shared celebrity, of the social media variety, that bonds them.
Podcast questions are supposed to seem clever and intriguing, be softball without seeming softball by being a little strange and unlikely to generate some typically prepared response, and also indulge the audience’s desire to pry deeply into the intimate, personal lives and mindsets of famous celebrities. “What’s your theory of you” fits the bill.
Personally, I’m more interested in the public intellectual libertarian economists theories of each other. An example:
http://whaaales.com/the-hedgehog-and-the-fox-gmu-economist-edition/
Start-up Questions:
1a. What secret do you know that few others believe?
1b. How did you earn that secret?
Some questions seem designed to extract a meaningful comparison: how are you different, how are you the same, what path got you there?
The Hanson/Cowen quotes about each other are entertaining because they reveal that they are both terrible systemizers. Maybe it’s just reality TV for celebrity economists vying for status; the ultimate irony.
1a. What secret do you know that few others believe?
The Null Hypothesis in education: there is no scalable change to American education that will have a significant lasting positive effect on student performance. In other words, far from being a miserable failure, American schools are doing about as well as they can. (Of course, American schools are a miserable failure to achieve what people want them to achieve, but that’s like saying the American system of food is a miserable failure because it does not produce cheap, nutritious, great tasting food that can be eaten in any amount without causing weight gain.)
Asking “what’s your theory of you?” gets you blackballed from my imaginary podcast.
Ok then, what’s the clever question you ask to your imaginary guests on your imaginary podcast?
Tyler says that it is important to make people feel good about themselves.
Assuming, of course, that the things that make people feel good about themselves are worth fostering. Which is a much, much, harder question.
It’s hard to incorporate folk dancing into a blog.