Seeking Truth Honestly

I recently watched a keynote given by economist Tyler Cowen at the Stanford Centre for Ethics in Society. I don’t want to comment on the content here (though it really is fascinating), rather I want to praise the experiment that he ran in the speech that he gave.

Now it’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Cowen - I think he may be the public intellectual who has influenced me the most.  He is a fantastically erudite and curious person who is willing to speak frankly and without ego.  He has turned his voracious appetite for ideas and information into a career that spans well beyond his academic foundation as an economist.

In this particular talk, he was promoting a new book - as one does.  However, unlike most other authors, he didn’t use the time to lay out the arguments in that book and try to persuade the listeners that his ideas were correct.  He correctly points out that the majority of these book talks are very repetitive and often are a waste of everyone’s time.  Once you have laid out the argument in book or keynote form, why should you travel around the world giving exactly the same argument again and again when anyone could just read or watch the original source material?  He argues that these sorts of public presentations are more for the author’s ego than for the value gained by those listening.

So instead, his talk was dedicated to trying to argue against his own thesis.  He used the time to put himself in the shoes of his critics and talk through the holes in his book, the assumptions that he may have made, and where he got things wrong.  His reasoning was that this would be far more interesting and worthwhile for those listening - as it might bring the listener inside his own internal dialogue as he struggled with difficult ideas and concepts.

And it was.

It was an extremely refreshing take on these public presentations and showed that he is not dogmatically attached to his ideas, but rather is doing everything he can to search for truth.  He would be extremely happy if someone could disprove one of his arguments or could persuade him to change his mind - because then he would be closer to the truth.  And to take on this sort of exercise in front of a Stanford audience shows how intellectually honest he is.

It was a wonderful example of how to steel man your opponent’s argument and I really want to see more experimentation like this in the public intellectual realm.  With YouTube and podcasts, there really is no need to repeat the same spiel on every single interview that you give on a book tour.  By thinking more creatively about how to bring value to the audience, we could change the nature of the industry completely and set the right example for those to come.

Thank you Tyler.  Let’s follow your example.