Some quotes from Cowen on internet writing from the episode:

Well, Internet writing, it’s not a discipline, but it’s a sphere, and plenty of it happens more than ever before. But it’s segregated from what counts as original theorizing in the academic sense of that word. Is that a good or bad segregation? I’m not sure, but it’s really a very sharp, radical break from how things had been. And it’s why I don’t think there’ll be a new GOAT contender. Probably not ever. Or if there is, it will be something AI-related.

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The discipline ceased to matter. That really good Internet writing is multidisciplinary. When I meet someone like a Scott Aronson, who’s doing, like, computer science, AI type Internet writing on his blog, I have way more in common with him than with a typical research economist, say, at Boston University. And it’s not because I know enough about computer science, like I may or may not know a certain amount, but it’s because our two enterprises are so similar. Or Scott Alexander, he writes about mental illness also. That just feels so similar, and we really have to rethink what the disciplines are. It may be that the method of writing is the key differentiator for this particular sphere, not for everything.

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At the margin, I would like to see more people raised on Marginal Revolution. I don’t just mean that in a selfish way. Regarding the internet writing mode of thinking, I would like to see more economists and research scientists raised on it, but the number may be higher than we think. If I hadn’t run Emergent Ventures, I wouldn’t know about Basil, per se, maybe would not have met him. And it’s infectious, so it might always be a minority, but it will be the people most likely to have new ideas. It’s a very powerful new mode of thought, which I’ll call the Internet way of writing and thinking. And it’s not sufficiently recognized as something like a new field or discipline, but that’s what it is.