Tyler Cowen's 9pt Self Improvement Guide

So I would like to give you Tyler Cowen's simple 9-point guide, how to improve yourself, which oddly no one here has really talked much about. It's all about how to improve the world. First point: be nice. Just always be nice. It's good for your happiness also. Second point: try to meet your dean. Deans really matter. But don't meet your dean to tell your dean how important you are. Deans are wise to that. Meet your dean to listen to your dean, whether or not you agree with the dean. Third point: work at a state school. You don't have to do this, but you have much freer speech at a state school. Now, I get the dollars and cents equation here. You are on average paid considerably less at a state school. As someone who's very pro-capitalist, it's fine by me if you prefer the money. But let's then just be honest about what we're all on about here. A lot of you are a bunch of people who would rather have, less free speech and earn more money. That's fine. That's the same calculus that other people in the system are making. But you can get a lot more free speech by coming to George Mason. I'll do my best to get you hired. Fourth, try to raise some money for your school. I mean, some of you here are faculty. Some of you listening are faculty. I mean, what's the polite way to put this, but some of you are parasites, right? And try not— try not to be parasites. If you do it properly, you will actually have more free speech de facto if you're able to raise some money for your school. So I say do it, and it can be money for a program you believe in. Fifth point, and this is really important: leave, or at least redirect your energies. Consider the world today outside the university. You have more than 100x de facto free speech than you did before the internet. Not 30% more, not 2x more, 100x more. My de facto free speech I never could have had before the internet. So it's there now. You just have to take it. And the relative influence of the internet compared to universities in driving ideas for the next generation, that's been an enormous shift away from the universities. So there's this incredible solution. You can even keep your tenured post if you want. So I would just say, do it. I mean, in the universities, as I indicated before, we've lost the battle. Look around this room, the speakers, us, we are old in this room. And after the first session, the line at the bathrooms, the line for the men's bathroom was really long and no line at the women's bathroom. Even at an NBA game, you won't see that. Or if I go to an effective altruism conference, the positive energy I feel in the room from the young people is incredible. I don't feel that here. I really don't. I'm not blaming any of you, not blaming Stanford, the organizers. But our cause is losing in the universities. Our cause is winning very dramatically in the world. So live in the world first and foremost. My next recommendation— for some of you, be a right-winger. There's a lot more free speech on the right than on the left. To be clear, this is not for entirely good reasons. So I think, in some parts of the right, there are people there who believe what, to me, are unacceptable things. I do tolerate them, that's my basic temperament. I find it uncomfortable, but the net result is much more free speech on the right. Now, this is not true for everyone. If you're trying to get an assistant professor job in sociology, You're not gonna have more academic freedom by being on the right. But if you are Larry Summers, or dare I say Steven Pinker, who is here— what's that old children's song, like, "Rover, Red Rover, let Johnny come over"? Like, we embrace you. If you're a right-winger, they do not cancel Satan. The number of hard-left people who try to cancel Larry, Steven, a bunch of others like you, is enormous. If you were more like us sociologically, you would actually be a lot safer. So please, we'll do our best to make you feel entirely welcome and defend your free speech. Just realize not having total or even satisfactory free speech, it's nothing new. It's almost all of human history. It doesn't mean you should like it or accept it. Universities at their most potent, 19th century Germany, didn't have free speech. Again, work to improve it, but to keep your own sanity, just count the blessings you have. They're really quite incredible, even if you're someone who is partly cancelled. So be optimistic. It will make you effective, will attract more dynamic young people. Be more like the effective altruists in that way. So like, A, don't whine. B, don't whine about the whiners. And I know I'm whining about the whiners a bit here, but don't whine about the whiners about the whiners, and so on. And now I have to stop at this point or it will just collapse into total self-contradiction. And the final point is just don't let the free speech crusade turn you into an opponent of free speech. And I see this many times. So I'm against all the canceling and the this and the that. Like, I know those stories. I'm on the side of, I think, you know, almost everyone here. But I see and hear people all the time, they go overboard.. And when people criticize them exercising their free speech, there's not a sufficient distinction drawn. I was struck by the first talk by John Haidt, whom I, I love and admire, but he closed his talk by saying, you know, the real problem here is free speech. It's all this stuff that people were saying on social media between 2014 and 2016. Now, he's entitled to his opinion. We should take his opinion seriously, but it's stunning to me that our first big talk, our keynote speaker, closes without even admitting it with an attack on free speech. So, like, be positive, be good, some of you be right-wing, and to the rest of you, thank you all for coming and listening.