Tyler Cowen

And it's very automatic.

Whereas you try to figure out what Ed Boyden is doing with the light shining into the brain, it's like, oh my goodness, do I understand this at all?

Or am I like the guy who thinks the demand curve slopes upward?

So it just means I'm only going to do a smallish number of scientists, and that's a shame.

But maybe AI can fill in for us there.

That's right.

There's a lot of other evidence that that's the correct portrait.

I think the culture he came out of had a lot of dogmatism to begin with.

And I mean both Leninism, which is extremely dogmatic.

You know, Lenin was his mentor, like Patrick's thing about the Nobel laureates.

It happens in insidious ways, too.

So, you know, Lenin is the mentor of Stalin.

Soviet culture, communist culture, and then Georgian culture, which appealing and fun-loving

and wine drinking and dance heavy as it is, there's something about it that's a little, you know, you pound the fist down and you tell people over the table how things are.

He had all those stacked vertically and then we got this bad genetic luck of the draw on Stalin and it turned out obviously pretty terrible.

I think what Hayek said is subtler than that.

And I wouldn't say it's Hayek's explanation.

I would say Hayek pinpointed one factor.

There are quite a few autocracies in the world today where the worst people have not risen to the top.

UAE would be, I think, the most obvious example.