Mark Carney
"(1) [G]o over [your speeches] multiple times. You need to give the speech in order to understand how — practice giving the speech, and then that reveals things that you can pull in or sentences which are too complicated, that which won’t be well understood. (2) Have stories, have things that illustrate your deeper point... [P]ut the substance as much as possible into footnotes, so you’re well-grounded in terms of your argument but it’s not cluttering the argument and losing your audience. (3) [K]eep the pacing and the insights spread so that you’re retaining your audience.... if you lose your audience, you’ve lost them."
Nathan Nunn
“[W]hen you’re in this pressure cooker of grad school within Cambridge, let’s say, there’s a lot of pressure, so you can’t help but to think about your career, and you can’t help but to think strategically. And I think that often goes against research. You’re less likely to take risks or to do things that are completely different than what’s being done currently. But ideally, we want scientists to do that."
John Cochran
“Tenure is useful for one thing. It forces people to make a decision. Tenure is not about the permanence of your employment it’s about when you get to have a vote about who else gets to be in this place. And it forces people to sit down and read the damn papers.”
Audrey tang
“Good local time everyone.“ Global greetings.
“We see democracy as a set of technologies, social technologies. To us, technologies are not always industrial; it could also be social. The set of constitutional amendments, of which another one or few is going on right now, shows that even the constitution, the kernel of democracy, is technology — that people can contribute to it just like sending pull requests to the Linux kernel.”
Philip Tetlock
“Accountability to conflicting audiences and value pluralism. You have a richer internal dialogue. You learn to balance conflicting perspectives more. You have to be a better perspective taker." - on people with second cultures
"If you’re a liberal, read the Wall Street Journal. If you’re a conservative, read the New York Times. Expose yourself to dissonant points of view. Try to cultivate some interests outside your field, and try to connect them together."
Rachel Harmon
"The two things I look for most in a legal scholar — one is, I want to see someone who’s a dog with a bone. I want to see someone who just has a set of questions, even if it’s unrelated, some set of fundamental questions that bothers them enough that they just have to keep coming back to them again and again. Then, maybe if I can mix my metaphors, I want to make sure that bone is a rich vein to mine. I want to know that that’s going to yield results over years and years.“
Conversations producer
“Don’t meet your heroes.”
Esther Duflo
“I was the RA of the RA of Jeff Sachs whom I never met but was kind of hustling. And I didn’t agree with everything they were doing but I saw they had the luxury to think about things and then to be heard by policy makers and I thought wow this is the best job in the world."
Daron Acemoglu
“Natural resources. You could be doing things wrong but still have high income per capita.”
“Economists have to appeal to a broader audience.”
“We should value people who are able to reach a broader audience, think outside the box. And sometimes fads really determine who and what can get publicized in top 5 journals. So if you have some big ideas and you’re looking at the world and looking at the data in a different way but your identification isn’t solid, you’re never gonna get into a top 5 journal. But we shouldn’t be discouraging that type of research.”
“I use voice recognition software.”
“8 years ago, I didn’t read blogs. Now I do more of that. But when I work, I don’t goof around on the internet.”
“Keep students up when they’re feeling down about the quality of their work.”
Mark Zuckerberg
“Every economist should have studied the East Asian economic miracle, the industrial revolution, and two weeks or more in a poor village."
"Let talent rip and let groups form." - Tyler
MZ's policy on who to fund: (1) People who are curious. Vision. (2) People who have bold ambitions. (3) People who have stamina. They just don’t ever stop. (4) People who are working in productive small groups. Eg whatsapp effect.
Ted Gioia
"The most creative music happening these days usually is at the intersections of different genres because the genres themselves have been overcome with the formula. As I said a little while ago, the formula is the curse."
"I would love to see some PhD student study hit records of different decades and figure out how frequently notes deviate from pitch, and how that’s changed over time. I think you would find an amazing reduction in that."
Cool question: "What’s the popular song you’re most embarrassed to admit to really liking? - Tyler
Henry Farrell
“What I miss is also what I’m happy to get away from, which is the sense of comfort and belonging. Ireland is a very small country.”
See here for empirical questions.
Hollis Robbins
“Act in ways that you would like to see the world act, not just do unto others or do not do unto others. But is the way you are being right now the way you would like to see the world run?”
Masha Gessen
"People lived well enough [in Russia in 2011] that they had the luxury of demanding good governance. When you’re constantly worried about your survival, you do not actually engage proactively in politics.”
Neal Stephenson
"I was ironing a shirt… It’s a freaking complicated object."
Sujatha Gidla
“I think hipsters is just in clothes and stuff, but not in attitude."
Russ Roberts
"Even the devil quotes scripture."
“Everyone worships."
Conversation on reading: ROBERTS: What’s the ratio of books that you finish relative to the books you start?. COWEN: Well, eventually, it will be all of them, right? My latest book, whatever that is, I haven’t finished. ROBERTS: But don’t you pick up some books and don’t finish? COWEN: Oh, reading books. I thought you meant writing them. ROBERTS: Should I restate that? It’s too good. [laughs] COWEN: Maybe I finish one out of ten. I don’t know. ROBERTS: Right, one out of ten. When I was younger, I found it deeply disturbing not to finish a book I started. It’s an interesting rule that says finish every book you start. If you have that rule, you will pick more judiciously, ideally, and be a little more careful, but that was my rule. I also had a rule not to write in my books because I found that to be sacrilegious, in some sense, to deface the book. I never opened it all the way, so when I finished a book in my youth, it looked brand new, but I had read it. I’ve changed all of those things. Now I write in my books. I don’t finish lots of books. Quitting is a good strategy if you know when to do it.
Sam Altman
"I think one thing that is a really important thing to strive for is being internally driven, being driven to compete with yourself, not with other people. If you compete with other people, you end up in this mimetic trap, and you sort of play this tournament, and if you win, you lose."
"There are very few activities that are high enough adrenaline to totally stop thinking about work, and racing cars is certainly one of them. But watching it is not that fun."
Jordan Peterson
"A highly produced television show just looks like a lie."
Daniel Kahneman
"Vacations are investments in the formation and maintenance of memories."
Eric Schmidt
"The best way to get people to do stuff is to have it be their idea."
Rob Wiblin
“[S]urveillance tends to corrupt your rulers, and it tends to increase the returns to being in charge. I think, over time, it increases the chances of, say, a coup d’état or political instability in China.
"Even though you have more stability at the ground level, you may have less stability at the top. I think this is one of the two or three biggest issues facing the world right now.”
"Should you always have to ask permission for everything you do? That would be a tyrannical regime.”
Paul Krugman
Come back here. Something on following your curiosity in digging into a question if the existing explanations do not satisfy you.
Michael Pollan
“Read better writers than you are. In other words, read great fiction. Cultivate your ear.”
David brooks
"We’ve produced a society that’s made being 25 phenomenally difficult, in part because you’re in the most supervised childhood in human history until 21, and after that, you’re released into the complete void."
Bryan Caplan
"I think most scholars are primarily about career advancement. I don’t think there is that much curiosity."
Nassim Taleb
"Is there anything more human than showing a scar."
"Gibran’s kind of New-Age stuff for Americans."
"My worst are microeconomists [I think he meant macro*] because you can macro-bullshit more easily than they micro-bullshit."
Martina Navratilova
"Short memory for bad stuff. Long memory for good stuff."
Bruno Maçães
"This idea that you find in Europe now, that without projecting any kind of power, other countries will be attracted to the European model, that’s a form of utopianism. I just cannot see that happen."
Thoughts: Jesus this guy is so good.
Michelle Gelfand:
Come back to Gelfand on mentoring and mentee as family member.
Ben Sasse
“Like every grad student, I wrote a 520-page dissertation because I didn’t have time to write a 220 page dissertation.” Min 13
“The man who chooses not to read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” quoting Twain. Min 1:06
Malcolm Gladwell
“I'm gonna take your dollar and I'm gonna commit to spending five cents of it every year. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard.” - on university endowments (simplistic, but provokes thought on capital accumulation and investment)
"The people who will one day be good need to pass through mediocrity on their way to being good."
Edward Luce
"It's very hard to analogize the US with Europe. ... your system works better when each party is a coalition between different interests and the fact that each is becoming more and more monochromatic, more and more disciplined and parliamentary, is disastrous for this system. This system doesn't work like that."
“India's sheer pluralism is very stabilizing if you take a... 30,000-foot view. If you're in the midst of it, you think it's anarchy."
“The actual assimilation problem: the immigrants assimilate so so rapidly into some notion of this slightly earlier American. It’s many of the rest of us who are having trouble assimilating.”
“Mediocrity is what’s underrated.”
Mary Roach
“The essence of an astronaut in today’s astronaut corps: long missions, long days, getting along with other people, that kind of amazing placid, accepting, patient... person." On the stereotypical astronaut.
Mark Miller
“The idea of brands is dated.”. Min 39.
Steven pinker
"It’s deeply pleasurable to read arguments that support a view that you already hold." Min 1:20.
Ezra Klein
"There’s a lot of bullshit in the economy." Min 35:30.
Garry Kasparov
“We’ll need new kind[s] of lawyers." Responding to the following question about algorithms and justice. Suppose a mortgage lending algorithm discriminates by gender. "No human can even understand the algorithm, much less judge it... What happens then, legally? Or is it simply the case that so many new chains of cause and effect are so nontransparent to us, we don’t even know what to do?"
Camille Paglia
“The kind of teaching that goes on in the Ivy League where there is a kind of flattery, like these small seminar things ok and there’s all this practice and learning how to talk in this slightly pretentious way about things and impressing each other. You know so what? So they’re packaging them for hot bourgeoisie. Oh god and they’re so proud of themselves as they produce these clones. These witless clones.”
“You have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded and reminisced and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. And that’s what we have.”
Dani Rodrik
“China has engineered history’s most miraculous poverty reduction program.” Min 26.
Luigi Zingales
“The best most successful organizations are the ones who spend a huge amount of time selecting people.” 1:04.