Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent
kulesa.substack.com
kulesa.substack.com
“You learn about other cultures, you learn different points of view by refining your eye and you develop a skill that is extremely useful for judging other things and cracking cultural codes in other settings. It’s an education in market economics - art markets. Like how do you buy the best pictures in an area Haitian art, or how do you assemble a very good voodoo flag collection? How do you get artists in Mexico to do their best work for you? That’s a business problem that you need to solve.
You want experience at solving a broad diversity of problems, to heighten your aesthetic sense, to learn some real history, and to understand how some of the art world works, surround yourself with beauty.
And you should buy it for the love of the art, and try to find that which other people have not really found or appreciated yet. It’s just like the world of ideas right? It is the world of ideas. It just costs more to play in it in terms of upfront dollar commitments.” [Tyler Cowen: Production Function. David Perrell, North Star Podcast.]
Relying on markets and the opinions of others may be effective in determining current economic value, but it is not a fruitful approach for finding "talent", broadly defined. Contemporary art is an excellent place to observe this phenomenon; there is very little connection between "aesthetic value" and "market value." The art market is a fascinating thing, but make no mistake, the most popular artists are not the most "talented", by whatever definition of talent you may have.
"Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values."
- Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
This may mean that he's applying a economist's mindset, like an engineer might apply an engineering mindset... but either might be besides the point. More about choice of method and language than substance.
Tyler calls his study of the humanities “cracking cultural codes,” and he highlights this as the most “importantly novel” activity he practices.
I'm suggesting that this may be besides the point. I don't really know, but I suspect that while being an economist lends a lot of form, it might not be all that important to substance... or less important than other things, even though it's highly visible.
For example, Tyler will try to quantify desires with money. How much would you have to pay me to do this, or how much would I pay to do it. That's a very economist-ey quirk, but I'm not sure it changes outcomes as much as it might seem.
Re: art, I think the identity points that matter is that Tyler isn't an artist. What he is isn't necessarily all that important. He's a pretty weird guy, and a lot of his instincts are probably more artist-like than economist-like anyway.
There's something very strange I've noticed in contemporary art, that in the last 20-30 years the value of talent, hard work, and aesthetics have dimished massively in critics and influencers eyes.
I don't think it's made the world a better place. It's almost like creating anti-art is now trendy and popular, creating aesthetic art is seen as boring and old. Chaos is preferred over order, destroying and standing up to old structures is seen as art, not building on previous knowledge.
Now I know there is a lot of value in rebelling, I rebelled a lot myself, but I think it's gone way overboard. You need a balance of rebellion and the old. Rebellion by itself is destructive over the long run.
Wait, so how do you determine this "aesthetic value" if not by how much people are willing to work to acquire it?
Your personal opinion? Some authority figure? Maths?
Truly answering your question would take a long time, but a short version might be something like: the collective opinions of a diverse group of highly informed and experienced (not necessarily educated as in a university) individuals. But that's just one approach and there are many others.
Even then, anything is probably superior to using monetary value as equivalent to anything other than what the market currently prices it as. I certainly don't think the most expensive painting is the most beautiful one, although it may be not be totally uncorrelated.
If you're interested in these kinds of questions, definitely look into the philosophical field of aesthetics.
A sibling comment to yours pointed out a critical flaw in using price as a measure: it gives different people very unequally sized votes.
Measuring instead in something like logarithmic uttiles would instead give all people a similarly-sized vote.
My problem with all measures of aesthetics that do not give everyone an equal vote (like your proposal for a committee of experts) is the fat selection bias inherent.
I can think of no way to produce that committee that doesn't involve self-reinforcing feedback loops that bias the committee toward a local optimum that doesn't actually reflect the standards of all of humanity.
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But. Then again, maybe this is one of those situations Weisberg talks about where trying to find the "main effect", i.e. the aggregate opinion of all humans, is meaningless.
Maybe it's more interesting to find out what specific groups of people think, and then I'm sure a committee of such people works. But one has to be up-front about what is then measured.
If you don't mind reading a dictionary, The Dictionary of Aesthetics by Dabney Townsend is also a good overview of many different ideas and terms.
Otherwise, I am a big fan of Japanese aesthetics, which is much more "in the world" than the more abstract Western philosophical approach. For this, I really recommend the short essay A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie.
Also, one of my favorite novels is My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. It is about Ottoman miniature painting and has extensive discussion on aesthetics, painting, and similar topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
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On your other comment, I might agree with Weisberg that we aren't really going for an aggregate opinion of everyone. Instead, we need a way to measure the opinions of a diverse group of experts, whatever that might mean specifically.
A good analogue might be military strategy. If we were to ask "Who was the best general of all time?", we'd likely want to ask military historians (academic experts), actual generals (experiential experts), as well as amateur enthusiasts that are extremely knowledgeable but don't have the right credentials. We'd also probably want various other groups of people like soldiers, politicians, (resurrected) great generals like Napoleon or Hannibal themselves, etc.
As long as we had a decent method for validating membership of these different groups, I think we'd get a reasonably decent answer.
In terms of architecture, this expert-only approach might have some limitations and we would need to add the townspeople and library readers to our analysis. But this is more because buildings are something practical used in the world and not just art in a gallery.
And no I wouldn’t say you have no taste. Most aestheticians throughout (global) history would likely dislike that building. It’s only a recent phenomenon that such styles became so prevalent, largely out of ignorance or rejection of previous things.
Since the modern web is terrible, I was confronted with a pop-up dialog in Swedish (I assume) which prevented seeing the image
I realize this is unsatisfying to many, but there really is no other choice. A strict empiricist has no way of knowing whether or not art is good. In fact, a purely empirical worldview will find it hard to have art in it at all. There's no way to distinguish subjective from arbitrary.
If you do accept that taste exists and that subjective != arbitrary, we can move forward and discuss it without expecting externally verifiable tests for it. If you can't, maybe you shouldn't believe that art exists at all... or that we can gain any knowledge of it if it does.
Substituting price or popularity for quality is redundant. Just think in terms of price or popularity, and forget about quality. Calling popularity quality just because it's easier to define or measure muddies things up, whether or not you believe in taste.
Moreover, it doesn't even work as a relative scale. If Jeff Bezos spends half his fortune on one art piece, he is still one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. He won't be materially affected by this in any way. If I spend half my savings on an art piece, that puts me at a substantial risk (2 catastrophes and I'm broke).
Basically, Jeff has little opportunity cost to spending 50 billion, while I have enormous opportunity cost to spending 50,000. But Jeff doesn't work 1 million times as much as I do for that.
The art world is notorious for being a tax avoidance scheme, on top of money laundering and all sorts of other related activities. Tying market value and aesthetic value in the art world makes about as much sense as introducing the concept of "aesthetic value" when talking about Apple's stock price.
What about introducing it when talking about GameStop's stock price?
Yes, what's wrong with that? With a little katharsis mixed in, of course.
Because that's how art is sold today.
Over what time period?
> Your personal opinion?
Of course. It’s entirely possible to value something you personally cannot afford.
Art appreciation extends beyond mere aesthetic value. For example we are able to create pottery that is far more aesthetically pleasing than ancient times. Yet a rare, archeological pot is probably going to fetch far more value than a piece from your neighborhood artist who probably has far more knowledge about pottery than his ancient equivalent.
Everyone should listen to some episodes of Conversations with Tyler. I normally hate interview podcasts, but it is bar none the best one out there. It doesn't matter the topic - the questions he is able to hit his subjects with are amazing, nothing at all like how most interviews go.
The only people online who have a similarly thoughtful and generous spirit, in my direct experience, is Russ Roberts and Scott Alexander.
Prob reveals a lot about the media I consume (and my demo profile) but I am definitely open to others if there are more like these three out there.
Most of his episodes are great though.
Ask yourself, do you think the person who invited you / hired you is stupid? Probably not, given the people around you smart and capable.
In this specific case, of course, finding people who are not yet accomplished is entirely the point.
Congrats on your selection.
For example, there was this teenager who was building CubeSats. All I did at that age was play World of Warcraft =D
If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.
Believing this would quickly kill every room as the people inside leave.
What it's really saying is that if you believe that you are the smartest person in the room, and you are there just to teach, as you have little to learn, that you need to be in a room where you really believe you have a lot to learn from the others there. This is true regardless of how much better, or worse, you happen to be.
I sure have seen rooms where almost everyone thought they were the smartest person in the room, and others where nobody thought they were the smartest. A common problem in startups is that you end up building the first room, when you really need to be building the second.
Well put. Thank you.
Please note that the corollary is finding a room that contains at least one person as smart as you are or smarter. If that seems too high a bar, you've got problems.
I say this because back when I used to frequent Marginal Revolution, I found that there was a good deal of self-promotion of Cowen's work in the website - for example, he would link an interesting news story and provide minimal commentary, but then would link his tangentially related research. I understand his incentive for doing this, but the amount of self-promotion was enough to annoy me and make me stop reading.
Years later, I attended a presentation that Cowen gave that was ostensibly on his book the Great Stagnation, but in reality it turned out to be a demonstration of some online learning venture he was bankrolling at the time.
He's a smart and productive guy, no doubt, but my (anecdotal) experiences make me wonder about what is behind an article like this.
Either way, the people that came to the presentation didn't come to hear about the product he was promoting - we wanted, at least I wanted, to hear the ideas in his book. Instead we got the old switcheroo.
The conspiracist right's complex over Soros and the conspiracist left's complex over the Kochs are two sides of the same coin, with their own terrible book-length screeds to match.
At least one of these you have to explicitly ask to be added to to be mentioned in. It's worthless as a measure of value, yet taken to be one by this person.
That's what more money than sense gets you, I guess: A worship of dilettantes and a reliance on marketers to make commercials to advertise every opportunity to you.
https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=emergent+ventures+winners
A number of award winners are already very accomplished. In this most recent cohort, there's a woman who's a professor at Brown, has a PhD from Harvard, and written multiple books.
It would be interesting to see how accomplished the award winners are and how early in their careers they received the award.
Regarding success rate, his explicit goal is to fund extremely ambitious people and projects that would otherwise struggle or not get funding at all. This could mean funding the most speculative or risky (or highly societally beneficial but lower financial return) ideas from already accomplished people or funding talented people that would struggle to get funding otherwise (due to age, access to capital, etc). I believe (and I think TC agrees) that there are likely many people and projects whose course could be substantially altered for the better if given access to a reasonably small amount of money early enough to convince the person to work on it full time.
I’m curious what his record is like in finding people with talent who haven’t yet done much.
Will this article disrupt that?
Shouldn't be hard to verify, no? Have him pick 2N candidates, randomly select half that he can not announce publicly, talk to or otherwise influence (impossible to prevent entirely but "good enough" will suffice to establish a difference). Then look at how the two groups are doing some time down the line.
You can't improve what you can't measure.
But is the goal of these sorts of things often actually to select the best?
But if you want to do this sort of thing for some sort of "making the world a better place" reason... or want to actually truly select the best... you gotta test it!
And yes, this requires you to be very self-reflecting and open to the possibility of being wrong, but is it truly so hard to imagine that someone would rather know than not know?
It's easier to take him at his own word - the program is so effective because the audience is self selected:
> “I try to stay a bit weird and obscure enough that mostly quite smart people are writing me. If I had too many not smart emails I would feel that I was doing something else wrong with what I’m writing.” … “The rate of good applications is reasonably high. Maybe I’m lowering it just by talking about the program.”
Well, publishing articles with hyperbolic titles seems like painting a big, glowing target for status-seekers to come and ruin Cowen's signal-to-noise ratio.
- Intense curiosity
- Deep knowledge of economics
- Strong interpersonal skills
- Risk taking bias - e.g. focus on MR was a significant risk for him
No surprise that he's exceptionally good at identifying and backing talent in this way.
I actually think the curiosity and risk taking bias are key here.
One of the most smartest people you'll ever read or speak to. It seems he has at least a modest understanding of important topics in almost any field you can mention, and an impressive mastery in a few dozen. From Brutalist architecture, tennis to Latin American art.
He talks and writes about politics, but rarely if ever is dogmatic or partisan. Has no problem admitting he was wrong about something, or that he doesn't know the answer (depressingly rare).
I highly recommend his blog and podcast. IMO the most underrated interviewer in the game. Each of his guests he researches deeply and always asks the most incisive, intelligent questions you wish you had thought of.
TC is fairly popular among the HN set but could always be more widely known.
https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Identify-Energizers-Creatives-...
Not to say anything about libertarian - I'm just curious.
He talks about "too much regulation is choking the economy" guy, but he really means "lack of equity" (as in immigration is unnecessarily hard, building regulation is insane, etc), FAA regulation on supersonic flight currently hinders innovation (because it's not noise based but speed based).
There are talent curators in every single field, for instance from baseball, this reminds me of those old advisors in the movie Moneyball, who look at how people seem to be rather than using actual evidence of prior performance. Where is the quantification of TC's magical power? It's narrative, not numbers. The article doesn't address his failure rate or the bias of these selected stars getting a huge boost from a rich established individual.
Skepticism aside, I think we'd do well as a society to pull 18 year olds with a lot of promise out of college and directly into ventures for a year or two. They can always go back if they need to, but I question the wisdom of putting our best youth into a college system where their efforts are entirely hoop-jumping, self-promotional classes that contribute to a GPA but to no one else. We're effectively squandering their apprenticeship on grade values, not on projects or useful deliverables.
I admire his range and understanding and use of the halo effect, but when he talks about some of the fields I know, I can't help but notice that he waves his hands more than those airfield attendants who tell pilots how to move runaway planes.
Also, he is mostly a commentator, which is much easier than be a "creator" of something tangible, he is never put on the spot by anybody because he is TC and he has quick obscure comebacks that are challenging to address, like "I like Vietnamese cuisine", and he comes back with "but how has it changed since Vietnam moved to a more capitalistic society?". I mean, how come you answer that?
I am not hating on TC, he is a brilliant man, but for the life of me after his interviews (both as an interviewer and interviewee), I cannot remember a damn thing.
- Karl Popper
These sorts of criticisms of college seem bizarrely paternalistic or maybe fatalistic, acting like people lose all sense of agency just because they’re taking classes or something. The reality is that college is just like the rest of life: you get out of it what you put into it. It’s possible to coast and get the sheepskin, sure, but lots of people coast outside of college too.
There are certain types of ventures in which we could expect an 18-year-old to find success absent a college education, yes. Those doors are not closed to college graduates, though, and many doors are opened through advanced education—not all of which lead to commercial ventures.