I agree, but I feel it's worth trying to understand how he ended up there. Tyler Cowen is clearly very intelligent, so he's unlikely to have written such a howler without something interesting going on.
Pychoanalysing others is slightly uncouth, but Tyler started it[1], so I don't feel bad here.
My intuition is that when Tyler imagines certain scenarios he becomes anxious. The longer he engages with these thoughts, the more anxious he becomes. It's hard to be rational when you're anxious and it's quite natural simplify this to "all these thoughts are irrational".
Now, when someone is suffering from irrational anxiety, the typical advice isn't "keep thinking about it until you realise where you're being irrational", but "don't engage with those thoughts, it's a trap".
Cognitive behavioral therapy may seem like a counter-example, but it's the exception that proves the rule[2]. It pretends to be about challenging yourself to ask whether your negative assumptions are based in fact, but as far as I can tell, it appears to be about wielding isolated demands of rigor as mantras to provide your over-active mind a convenient excuse to believe what it wants. If it were really about rationality, it would ask you whether the situation was even worse than you thought and whether you were simply telling yourself it was only managably bad as a form of cope (please feel free to continue using such cope if you honestly psychologically need it).
So I expect that from the inside, dismissing such thoughts feels like just performing the obviously healthy behavior. After all, these thoughts are irrational (though perhaps just for him). And surely you shouldn't let irrational thoughts dominate you.
Sadly, life doesn't work that way. The best way to be absolutely certain that you don't make one kind of error is to fully embrace making the opposite kind of error. You can avoid ever trusting someone undeserving by never trusting anyone, you can avoid incorrectly being biased against someone by being strongly biased in their favor, you can avoid overspending by never spending more than necessary.
However, there's no lever to just "reject all irrationality". There's a lever called "reject all irrationality", but that's not the same thing. This lever takes you as far away as possible from the forms of irrationality that loom largest in your mind, such that introspecting after pulling it feels like you just pulled the true lever, but feelings aren't always accurate.
Now, this kind of reactivity isn't always problematic. Perhaps erring one way is much worse than erring the other. Perhaps you're faced with a slope that is slippery. Perhaps, you've implemented a temporary measure to break from your previous way of being. In these kinds of cases, erring all the way to one side may make sense.
It's actually plausible that maintaining such a strong epistemic bar for such fears makes sense for Tyler personally and that rejecting this rule would simply make him more irrational insofar as any gain in accuracy would be countered out by him falling prey to some irrational fears as well.
Stronger, he could actually be correct that most attempts to analyse such risks via rationalist style arguments will be distorted by fear. After all, you're much more likely to engage in such discourse insofar as you're scared and if you're drawn into a community, these fears will be amplified. So it's plausible that if such restrictions were followed as a universal rule, it could improve people's estimates on average, even if it would ultimately be an embrace of a levelingmediocrity.
However, neither of these means that his decision to run from anxiety is necessarily correct. And insofar as this is choice is unconscious, he won't know what trade-off he's making. This is rarely a good place to find yourself.
By describing the discourse as, "an extended exercise in personal anxiety management." He's welcome to that opinion, but he can't complain about some turnaround.
Epistemic status: Speculative psychoanalysis to illustrate a point
Many people have observed that Tyler Cowen's Act Like it is science is a clear case of an isolated demand for rigor.
I agree, but I feel it's worth trying to understand how he ended up there. Tyler Cowen is clearly very intelligent, so he's unlikely to have written such a howler without something interesting going on.
Pychoanalysing others is slightly uncouth, but Tyler started it[1], so I don't feel bad here.
My intuition is that when Tyler imagines certain scenarios he becomes anxious. The longer he engages with these thoughts, the more anxious he becomes. It's hard to be rational when you're anxious and it's quite natural simplify this to "all these thoughts are irrational".
Now, when someone is suffering from irrational anxiety, the typical advice isn't "keep thinking about it until you realise where you're being irrational", but "don't engage with those thoughts, it's a trap".
Cognitive behavioral therapy may seem like a counter-example, but it's the exception that proves the rule[2]. It pretends to be about challenging yourself to ask whether your negative assumptions are based in fact, but as far as I can tell, it appears to be about wielding isolated demands of rigor as mantras to provide your over-active mind a convenient excuse to believe what it wants. If it were really about rationality, it would ask you whether the situation was even worse than you thought and whether you were simply telling yourself it was only managably bad as a form of cope (please feel free to continue using such cope if you honestly psychologically need it).
So I expect that from the inside, dismissing such thoughts feels like just performing the obviously healthy behavior. After all, these thoughts are irrational (though perhaps just for him). And surely you shouldn't let irrational thoughts dominate you.
Unfortunately, reversed stupidity is not intelligence and rationality is not reversed irrationality. From the inside, running away from irrational thoughts feels like the most rational thing you could be doing. After all, you aren't just rejecting them, you're extra, double, triple, special, quadruple rejecting them. What better way could there be to truly demonstrate your commitment to rationality (Robin Hanson would interpret this as social signalling, The Last Psychiatrist as narcissism)?
Sadly, life doesn't work that way. The best way to be absolutely certain that you don't make one kind of error is to fully embrace making the opposite kind of error. You can avoid ever trusting someone undeserving by never trusting anyone, you can avoid incorrectly being biased against someone by being strongly biased in their favor, you can avoid overspending by never spending more than necessary.
However, there's no lever to just "reject all irrationality". There's a lever called "reject all irrationality", but that's not the same thing. This lever takes you as far away as possible from the forms of irrationality that loom largest in your mind, such that introspecting after pulling it feels like you just pulled the true lever, but feelings aren't always accurate.
Now, this kind of reactivity isn't always problematic. Perhaps erring one way is much worse than erring the other. Perhaps you're faced with a slope that is slippery. Perhaps, you've implemented a temporary measure to break from your previous way of being. In these kinds of cases, erring all the way to one side may make sense.
It's actually plausible that maintaining such a strong epistemic bar for such fears makes sense for Tyler personally and that rejecting this rule would simply make him more irrational insofar as any gain in accuracy would be countered out by him falling prey to some irrational fears as well.
Stronger, he could actually be correct that most attempts to analyse such risks via rationalist style arguments will be distorted by fear. After all, you're much more likely to engage in such discourse insofar as you're scared and if you're drawn into a community, these fears will be amplified. So it's plausible that if such restrictions were followed as a universal rule, it could improve people's estimates on average, even if it would ultimately be an embrace of a leveling mediocrity.
However, neither of these means that his decision to run from anxiety is necessarily correct. And insofar as this is choice is unconscious, he won't know what trade-off he's making. This is rarely a good place to find yourself.
By describing the discourse as, "an extended exercise in personal anxiety management." He's welcome to that opinion, but he can't complain about some turnaround.
Okay, an exception can't actually "prove the rule", but it can wink and nudge.