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PaperclipPerfector  16d ago (text post)   34194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Disclaimer: although I consider them high-quality by various proxy measures, ultimately I don't have enough knowledge to assess most of their takes.

Off the top of my head:

  1. Conversations with Tyler (misc);
  2. Any interview with Michael Everything-is-contingent Kofman, eg regular ones on the War on the Rocks (Ru-Ukr war, Ru military history);
  3. Ones and Tooze, by Adam Tooze (misc econ);
  4. SigmaNutrition (typically interviews with the authors of papers/books, discussion of nutrition research and methodology);

There is more, of course. Speaking of literal examples (from CwT):

Claudia Goldin:

COWEN: Let me ask a question I’ve been wondering about. Why does China, right now, have so many of the world’s self-made female billionaires?

GOLDIN: I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind being one. [laughs]

Joseph Henrich

COWEN: But productivity growth is falling, right? In most countries? This baffles me.

HENRICH: You mean why productivity growth is falling?

COWEN: Right. Japan, US, Western Europe. Productivity growth is lower than it was, say, before the ’80s. I don’t blame the Internet for that, but it doesn’t seem to have helped very much.

HENRICH: I’m a cultural evolutionist so I want to see this on much longer time scale. Ask me in 200 years.

[laughter]

COWEN: OK. 200 years, we’ll have you back for a second episode.

[...]

HENRICH: I’m not sure that that necessarily follows.

COWEN: But it’s a coherent cultural pessimist scenario.

HENRICH: [laughs] I’ll have to think about it more.

Paul Graham:

COWEN: Were the Medici good venture capitalists, or do you give greater credit to the Florentine guilds?

GRAHAM: I have no idea. I need to learn more about the —

COWEN: The guilds would run competitions. The Medici would just pick the people they liked. They both have good records in different ways, but obviously, they’re competing models.

GRAHAM: You’re an economist. You’ve read books about this stuff. I don’t know. What do I know about the Medici? [laughs]

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