Back on March 27 I posted some remarks on Tyler Cowen’s new monograph, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution. By April 1 I’d published four more sets of remarks, with the intention of publishing more. While I have since made two posts consisting mostly of conversations I’ve had with Claude that began with comments on Cowen’s book (Language as a computational object, Recursive-self-improvement is incoherent), I’ve not published any more directed toward the book. I’ve got four most posts planned, but don’t know when I’ll write them. I could get them all written within a week or so. Or they might drag on for a month or two, perhaps even more. It all depends on what else I’m doing.
Here’s what I’ve got planned:
- Biology through the ranks: Tyler writes about Linnaean taxonomy and Darwinian evolution in chapter 3; I regard them as Rank 3 and Rank 4 cognition respectively. To that I’ll add folk taxonomy, Rank 1, and the Great Chain of Being, Rank 2.
- Intuition vs. explicit cognition: In chapter 1 Tyler distinguishes between intuitive marginalism and tautological marginalism. I want to talk about intuitive recognition vs. explicit exposition. That distinction doesn’t quite fit with Tyler’s contrast; I’m going to talk about the differences between the two contrasts.
- Literary criticism vs. economics as academic discipline: I’ve written quite a bit about literary criticism as an academic discipline, most recently in The Discipline of Literary Criticism: A Quixotic Essay about Thinkers, Methods and Authority. The two disciplines differ in many ways. This post will discuss some of them.
- Marginalism in cognitive effort: Some speculative remarks about how Cowen decided that he had enough examples in chapter 1. You can find an early version of these remarks as a reply to a Substack Hollis Robbins wrote about Cowen’s book.
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