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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Matt Ridley
Read between
October 20 - November 15, 2020
Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance – and that happen to be useful.
Innovation, then, means finding new ways to apply energy to create improbable things, and see them catch on.
Serendipity plays a big part in innovation, which is why liberal economies, with their free-roving experimental opportunities, do so well. They give luck a chance.
the main theme of human history is that we become steadily more specialized in what we produce, and steadily more diversified in what we consume: we move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.
Mutual inter dependence is safer in the same way that diversifying portfolio is
Extra safety requirements have simply turned nuclear power from a very, very safe system into a very, very, very safe system.
It has undermined OPEC and Russia, leaving the latter frantically supporting anti-fracking activists to try to defend its markets – with much success in innovation-phobic Europe, where shale exploitation has been largely prevented.
Rosia Montana
Throughout history, technologies and inventions have been deployed successfully without scientific understanding of why they work.
The lesson of wheeled baggage is that you often cannot innovate before the world is ready.
innovation can be like a club: you pay your dues and get access to its facilities.
The location factor from unfair advantage
Something can be inevitable in retrospect, and entirely mysterious in prospect. This asymmetry of innovation is surprising.
Hinton’s family tree is studded with famous mathematicians, entomologists and economists, and he himself trained as a psychologist before developing in the early 1990s the notion of ‘back propagation’ in neural networks. This is essentially a feedback method that enables such networks to make internal representations of the world through ‘unsupervised learning’.
Raise for review
True, a life of farming proved often to be one of drudgery and malnutrition for the poorest, but this was because the poorest were not dead: in hunter-gathering societies those at the margins of society, or unfit because of injury or disease, simply died.
Most people want to think they have more control over their lives than is objectively the case: the idea of decisive and discontinuous human agency is both flattering and comforting.
Little to no 'great person' in history but mostly our need to feel important
explains why China lost its innovative edge when it turned its back on trade under the Ming emperors.
I always wondered what made China fall behind Europe after so much innovation was comming via the silk road in the middle ages
It will always be possible to raise living standards further by lowering the amount of a resource that is used to produce a given output. Growth is therefore indefinitely ‘sustainable’.
It would be strange to argue that innovation could happen without state direction in the nineteenth century, but only with it in the twentieth.
Trying to pretend that government is the main actor in this process, let alone one with directed intentionality, is an essentially creationist approach to an essentially evolutionary phenomenon.
If Google Glass had been a government project, the chances are they would still be ploughing on with it.
the precautionary principle largely ignores the risks of existing technologies, defying the concept of harm reduction.
Rather than minimizing risk, regulatory bodies use differentiated standards for innovative products
Desperate to kill a potential good news story coming out of biotechnology, Greenpeace continued to lobby hard against the crop even as it was proved by relentless experiments to be safe and effective. It was in response to this shocking campaign that 134 Nobel Prize-winners called on Greenpeace in 2017 to ‘cease and desist in its campaign against Golden Rice specifically, and crops and foods improved through biotechnology in general’ (150 have now signed the letter). Their call was in vain.
Example of harmful and non academic leftist ideology
why nobody really knows how to cause innovation, because no one can make people want something.
Of Europe’s 100 most valuable companies, none – not one – was formed in the past forty years.
This is big
‘The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb,’ wrote four Hong Kong scientists in 2007.
Covid early note 2007
