I recently embarked on a coding project despite being a fairly novice python programmer. I was successful thanks to my cheerful helper named Claude. The goal: make some end of year predictions ahead of the Conversations with Tyler "2024 Retrospective" show on December 25.
CWT is Tyler Cowen's podcast. It's an interview style show with a wide variety of guests across disciplines. Each year, Tyler does a end of year review where he and his producer discuss some of the more popular, controversial, and underrated episodes. I am curious to see if me and Claude can make some decent predictions.
Like many CWT listeners, I am also a Marginal Revolution reader. Tyler writes an MR blog post to introduce each new podcast episode. These posts are titled "My Conversation with..." sometimes qualified with "My Excellent Conversation with..." or "My Conversation with the excellent...". Tyler gives a bit of commentary, followed by a couple excerpts from the transcript, closing with a final bit of commentary, occasionally containing the word "Recommended" in some form.
I've always wondered if the title and guest qualifiers (e.g. "excellent") are clues into his preferences. Also, are the "recommended" episodes the best ones, or does Tyler recommend basically every one? My hypothesis is that these blog posts contain enough information to make some guesses about Tyler's preferences. The resulting blog discussion (comment quantity, not quality!) may help us infer episode popularity or controversy.