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Ross Anderson

Staff Writer, The Atlantic · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

journalistauthor@andersen ↗theatlantic.com/author/ross-andersen ↗

Ross Andersen reports on deep time, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and extreme climates for The Atlantic. Before joining The Atlantic, he was deputy editor of Aeon and science editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

10statements → 7claims → 6claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.8/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential →

6 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 6 assertions · 3 opinions · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 6 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ross argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Ice Age megafauna survived 30 interglacial warming cycles before their extinction
“Glaciations, like the ice age, was not three million years of glacial cold. It was like 10,000 year bursts of glacial cold, and then interglacials, they're called, where things would warm again. And these animals had weathered like 30 of those.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:28 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
100% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
none yet certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

258 words/min while actually speaking · 18.4 um and uh per 1k words · 11.1 false starts per 1k · 27.3% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Ross Anderson: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,528 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Ross Anderson said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Animal suffering in early mammoth generations is justified by rewilding benefits
“My view is that it's worth what will probably be some considerable suffering on the part of those, the first few, if not more, generations of these mammoths, and like, I am alive to that, and I actually try to talk about, in particular, the social suffering.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:01 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Prediction Open · timeframe Jul 2027
Growing a mammoth in an artificial womb is over a decade away
“And it's, you know, 200 pounds at the end of it, and you're going to do all that like really complex fine-tuning, maternal fine-tuning, like hormonal work, In this huge closet-sized tank, like, that is, that's more than 10 years away.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:26 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Opinion
Elon Musk's genuine sincerity drives his ability to fund radical ideas
“Yeah, like, he's really good at packaging crazy sounding ideas and, like, Getting lots of governments, investors to throw lots of money into them, and while managing to keep control of them. Part of that is the narrative, right? He does hook it into, like, lar…”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 29:03 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
Ice Age megafauna survived 30 interglacial warming cycles before their extinction
“Glaciations, like the ice age, was not three million years of glacial cold. It was like 10,000 year bursts of glacial cold, and then interglacials, they're called, where things would warm again. And these animals had weathered like 30 of those.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:28 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
African megafauna survived human expansion by co-evolving alongside humans
“One of the running hypotheses is that the megafauna of other continents were what's called naive prey, because like humans show up, harmless little thing, whereas in Africa, they, the megafauna there had grown up Alongside us, evolutionarily.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:26 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Opinion
George Church's minimal gene-editing strategy is the right approach to de-extinction
“He has the right approach, which is to make, like, again, as few tweaks to this genome as possible, just so you get these basic features, and then let nature do the rest.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:31 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
Arctic permafrost holds more carbon than the entire US carbon output
“That part of the world was so rich in Grass and in large animals at that time, it's got lots of sort of organic matter, which has lots of carbon in it, in fact, more than like the entire output of the United States right now.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:03 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
Grasslands keep the ground colder by reflecting more sunlight than forests
“What's neat about grasslands is they actually keep the earth underneath them colder. First of all, they reflect away more sunlight than the darker kind of tree regions.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:40 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
Pleistocene Park researchers use a Russian military vehicle to knock down trees
“In the absence of mammoths, they've just had, like, a huge Russian military transporter out on the plains that they're literally just, like, slamming into trees with.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:19 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real
Assertion Supported
Scientists have sequenced the entire woolly mammoth genome using ancient DNA
“We have used several DNA fragments to sequence like the entire woolly mammoth genome.”
Ross Anderson Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:02 a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real Jan 2, 2019 15m
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