CWT Quotations - Blattman and Gross

A couple quotations from some recent Conversations With Tyler. First up a conversation from May 4th, 2022 with University of Chicago professor Chris Blattman. University of Chicago strikes me as the ideal university environment; compare their ratings with some Wisconsin universities.

COWEN: Last question. You teach at the University of Chicago. It still seems, to me, the place has a special ethos, a mix of seriousness, people teaching things to themselves, showing up meaning business, free speech, some cluster of ideas. How has the University of Chicago maintained that? What’s the secret there?

BLATTMAN: I selected this place six years ago. In large part, that was one of its chief attractions, and I’ve asked myself that question. There’s a cheap answer, which is cultural persistence, but then, the question is why?

COWEN: So many university cultures have changed, right?

BLATTMAN: Maybe I’m going to go back and contradict myself — the political speech point. I think the university built its social identity around being that, and the reason you can point out this thing is not . . . Even if you didn’t spend any time there, you would be able to say that is the identity of this university because that’s what they say they are, and they show up in the news because they’re the university that does that.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a university has done that. The question is, why haven’t more universities done that? I was faculty at Yale, and I was faculty at Columbia, and they were many great things, but they were not places that self-consciously define themselves as places to be about ideas and about ideas at all costs. So it’s only in retrospect that I wonder why not.

Here's one from the May 18th episode with Daniel Gross.

COWEN: Say you gave the Diet Coke question to someone who came to you with a start-up. What would count as a bad answer, and why would it be bad?

GROSS: I think in interviews, in general, a very simple thing to look for that I’m still . . . By the way, I should mention a preemptive huge asterisk that I’ll only say once on this podcast, which is, I may say different hypotheses that I have, but they are opinions of a student, not of a master. I’m still learning.

But all of that said, I think sometimes in interviews, and when you meet people in general, there’s just a sense of being asleep or awake. Asleep is someone who doesn’t really even have the idea to think about the world as just like, maybe Diet Coke is something really good. What actually drives that? Someone who’s awake has actually had that thought already.

For me, the rejection of the question would really be the only bad answer, and I think that’s true in a lot of interviews in general. Like this very conversation we’re having — you can tell if people are having fun with each other’s questions and whatnot, or whether it’s monotonous. And someone who locks up and freezes when you ask them if maybe Diet Coke is correlated to productivity — which is a bit of a silly question at the end of the day — just the fact that they’re not having fun with it, I think, is something to look for.