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Jeremiah Johnson 🌐
@JeremiahDJohns
Tyler Cowen is an interesting person but has been a very sloppy thinker for a while. He gives the appearance of sophistication while lacking the actual thing. Scott is right to go after him, and frankly, it's a nuclear bomb vs coughing baby scenario. Scott ethered him here:
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Brian Lui
@brianluidog
I'm HERE for the ACX/Tyler fight. So good
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David Watson 🥑
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Zac Hill
@zdch
I agree that the “for some of us…” section just bodied Tyler, but I actually thought this section was poorly constructed. Tyler’s point about *being an stakeholder in the systems described, rather than arguing from hypotheticals with low situational awareness* matters a lot IMO.
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Maynard Handley 🟦
@handleym99
I don’t know. Scott’s argument seems to be a constant repetition of “but think of the children” and I’m tired of that. As a meta strategy, I think we have to automatically reject such an argument, just like I reject any “rights” based argument; because it’s just too easy to
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Cedric Warny
@cwarny
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Cedric Warny
@cwarny
Cowenification is when your rate of reading overwhelms your capacity to properly update your beliefs, leaving you with a disparate world view, inconsistent ideology, and a collection of unintegrated facts, but it all passes as sophistication
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Donnyhenville
@amongthelucky
I never understood why people think he's such an amazing interviewer either. Often it just seems like him asking a bunch of unrelated, preprepared questions, one after another. Perhaps that's a low bar many interviewers don't clear, but still
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Jordan Braunstein
@jbraunstein914
Cowen is an unabashed elitist and probably a social darwinist - he doesn't have much concern for the average person who isn't naturally equipped to excel, and he certainly thinks the lives and ambitions of exceptional people are more important, even if traded-off against the
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Paphlagonian Mode
@katakekuamene
A good demonstration of the value of different types of personalities in a broader intellectual ecosystem. "Sloppiness" here belongs with a cluster of traits that make Tyler strong in interviews and (weirdly) art reviews and weak in moralizing and detailed technical analysis
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gary 🇬🇧🚀
@Eldenofthering
They're both as bad as each other. Hopefully they matter/anti matter themselves through this fight.
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Shakeel
@ShakeelHashim
When do you think he became sloppy? (Struggling to answer this question myself — something changed, but I can’t tell what)
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The Notorious S.E.B.
@bigseb31213
once again yet more cases of "trump could be anything, he could even be a boat". A shared delusion somehow shared by socialists, "rationalists", "EAs", "respectable" conservatives, and everyone else who was looking for any excuse to engage in the ultimate lib owning
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vy
@vious_and_couth
I’m on Scott’s side all in all but that is NOT an intellectual Turing test winning steelman argument here.
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rintintin
@rint1ntin
I think they’re both very smart and pretty much all normies would benefit from reading / listening to their work. this is one of those “too online” fights - entertaining but doesn’t really show dominance of either. **standing up meme**
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Larry Siegel
@LaurenceBSiegel
Hmmm, I have learned much more from Tyler than from Scott because he writes intelligible prose and I can read his posts in less than three hours. Scott is obviously brilliant and I respect him tremendously but I can't say he's at the top of my daily reading list.
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Michael Hankin 🟣
@MothballHankin
What happened to Tyler? I just started listening to him again after a few years away, and he does NOT seem like the same thinker I used to enjoy
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Liam Carpenter-Shulman
@LiamCS10
I really enjoy listening to CWT, and I do think he is very insightful at times but i'll never forget his response to Jonathan Haidt about risks to kids from social media use that "won't AI just fix this?" Just one example of strangely blinkered thinking about social problems
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Carlos Aurelius
@CarlosAurelius
Tyler Cowen is a man of extremely good taste: in food, in art, in talent, in intellectual thought, etc. He is not a man of extremely good creative effort or intellectual thought himself. He is very good and important for his taste, though!
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BBinVA
@BBinVA1
Don’t even know what this is about but I agree that Tyler is incredibly selective in how he chooses to respond to arguments. He is also often wrong. Has incredibly impracticable ideas. Great aggregator of content tho
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JohnnyTwoFingers
@Johnny2Fingersz
> Tyler Cowen is an interesting person but has been a very sloppy thinker for a while. This is very true, and Tyler is a VERY smart human, showing how easy it is to fuck up thinking
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TheEyeOfHindsight
@rationalwikieye
Have you seen the probably-LLM-written MR post with a fake Francis Bacon quote that painted him as an opponent of the printing press and included the text "please tell more" in a place that didn't make sense?
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