Effective Altruism

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Amderat: effective altruism is underrated. He says the socratic dialogues are a much better kind of philosophy than most philosophies. The sheer intellect of robin hanson, for him, is still hard to fathom. Amderat: When someone gets angry at me, i just want to say, look, it's like getting angry at baby jesus.

"No single paper is that good", says Bryan Caplan. To really understand a topic, you need to read the entire literature in the field. And to do the kind of scholarship Bryan's work requires, you need to cover multiple fields. Only that way can you assemble a wide variety of evidence into useful knowledge.

But few scholars ever even try to reach the enlightened interdisciplinary plane. So how does he do it?

Tyler explores Bryan's approach, including how to avoid the autodidact's curse, why his favorite philosopher happens to be a former classmate, what Tolstoy has that science fiction lacks, the idea trap, most useful wrong beliefs, effective altruism, Larry David, what most economics papers miss about the return to education, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded April 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

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