Nat Friedman: prediction

Transcript context

…Okay, so we'll get to it in a second. But first, I want to ask about nat.org and the list of 300 words there. Which I think is one of the most interesting and very straussian list of 300 words I've seen anywhere. I'm just going to mention some of these and get some of your commentary. You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor. Why? First, I say probably. But what does it mean to raise the ceiling or the floor? I just observed a lot of projects that set out to raise the floor. Meaning – Gosh. We are fine, but they are not and we need to go help them with our superior prosperity and understanding of their situation. Many of those projects fail. For example, there were a lot of attempts to bring the internet to Africa by large and wealthy tech companies and American universities. I won't say they all had no effect, that's not true, but many of them were far short of successful. There were satellites, there were balloons, there were high altitude drones, there were mesh networks, laptops, that were pursued by all these companies. And by the way, by perfectly well-meaning, incredibly talented people who in some cases did see some success, but overall probably much less than they ever hoped. But if you go to Africa, there is internet now. And the way the internet got there is the technologies that we developed to raise the ceiling in the richest part of the world, which were cell phones and cell towers. In the movie Wall Street from the 80s, he's got that gigantic brick cell phone. That thing cost like 10 grand at the time. That was a ceiling raising technology. It eventually went down the learning curve and became cheap. And the cell towers and cell phones, eventually we've got now hundreds of millions or billions of them in Africa. It was sort of that initially ceiling raising technology and then the sort of force of capitalism that made it work in the end. It was not any Deus Ex Machina technology solution that was intended to kind of raise the floor. There's something about that that's not just an incidental example. But on my website, I say probably. Because there are some examples where people set out to kind of raise the floor and say – No one should ever die of smallpox again. No one should ever die of guinea worm again. And they succeed. I wouldn't want to discourage that from happening but on balance, we have too many attempts to do that. They look good, feel good, sound good, and don't matter. And in some cases, have the opposite of the effect they intend to. Here's another one and this is under the EMH section. In many cases, it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion. Now here's my question, what are the 8 billion minus 500 people doing? Why are there only 500 people?…

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