The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ridley: Technology evolves through Darwinian selection, not just intelligent design
“In that sense, they really, you know, the airplane and the boat really have evolved. It's not a metaphor. It's what's actually happening to them.”
Ridley: Government industrial subsidies reward political connections over merit
“Picking winners and saying, I want this technology to be developed by such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, you know, the wrong people end up getting the grants and t…”
Ridley: Communication and Idea Sharing Drive Innovation More Than Individual Genius
“I think what happens is that people share their ideas, exchange their ideas, collaborate, and what really counts is how well people are communicating with each other, not how clever they are as individuals.”
Ridley: Government advance purchase commitments drove COVID mRNA vaccine breakthroughs
“Governments all around the world have said, look, if someone can come up with a vaccine for COVID-. We will buy You know, forty million doses, fifty million doses, whatever it is that has worked to produce a huge race among different companies, and the great t…”
Matt Ridley: Human Innovation Can Continue Indefinitely by Using Fewer Resources
“I think this is probably what I'd tell people, that there's no reason we can't innovate indefinitely, if not infinitely. And people say, well, how can that be? We'll run out of resources. And I'll say no, because half the time these days, we're innovating to u…”
Ridley: Respiratory viruses stay mild so hosts stay active and transmit them
“On the whole, they stay mild because they want us going around going to parties, going to work. They don't want us sitting at home because we're not going to infect anyone if we stay at home. There's a sort of common interest there in not hurting us too much.”
Ridley: People are pessimistic about the world, not their individual lives
“We're not so pessimistic about our individual lives, interestingly, as we are about people and the planet generally.”
Ridley: Innovation is harder and more important than initial invention
“I want to talk about innovation, which is the process by which a bright idea is turned into something practical, reliable, and available, and affordable for ordinary people. And that's a long slog, and it's a lot of hard work, and it's often more important, mo…”
Ridley: Human progress is driven by production specialization and consumption diversification
“Well, I think the great theme of human history over millennia is that we become more specialized in what we produce and more diversified in what we consume.”
Ridley: Innovation fundamentally depends on individual and economic freedom
“You know, in the end, it all boils down to freedom, the freedom to
Exchange ideas, the freedom to fail and start again, the freedom to change your mind, the freedom to invest where you think it's right to invest the freedom as a consumer to express your prefe…”
Ridley: Small, free-trading city-states generate the most innovation
“The general point you can make, and this applies to Renaissance Italy and ancient Arabia and, Ancient China, and so on as well is that city states tend to be innovative, that, that, that independent, relatively small political units that are very vigorous trad…”
Ridley: Zero-sum thinking stems from millions of years of ancestral biology
“We've spent millions of years thinking that your gain is my loss. It's only in the last a 100,000, in some ways, that's how well trade seems to be, On a massive scale with the division of labor and the collaborative system I described earlier, it's more like t…”
Ridley: No single human knows how to manufacture a complete pencil
“There's an enormous network of people went into manufacturing this one pencil, and yet not one of them knows how to make a pencil. Not even the person working in the pencil factory. They just, because they don't know how to cut down a tree or grow coffee.”