Charles C. Mann: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah. Okay so assume that you're in the 1960s. Let’s say that you’re a philanthropic donor and you’re the 1960s version of an effective altruist who’s interested in doing the most good possible. In retrospect, it's clear that you should have funded Borlaug. I mean, counterfactually, he still does it, but let's just say that his work depends on your funding. How could you have identified work like that? Is there some criteria that is broadly applicable where you could have identified his work in Mexico using it? That's a really good question! I mean, that's the greatest good for the greatest number question. To do that, you would have to say, “What are the biggest problems facing the planet?” And then presumably, if you're Will McCaskill or somebody like that, you say, “All lives are equal. So what is the thing that's most affecting the most number of lives?” In that case, it’s probably clean drinking water. I think that's the biggie. So that means funding primarily urban infrastructure for water and setting up some kind of foundation or some independent agency that's insulated from the government to actually keep those water systems going. That would be my answer to that. That's how you would do it, I think you'd try to figure out, you know, “What are the bare necessities? What's killing more people than anything else?” In the 1960s, that was probably food and water. The Food and Agriculture Organization, once they got interested in Borlaug actually did a pretty good job of promoting him, and there's the creation of the sea guard system. Water is completely neglected and actually, I would channel it towards water. Interesting. Okay. I'm going to name two trends, and I want to know what you think these two imply for the debate between wizards and prophets in the future. So one of the trends is declining research productivity–– in terms of how many new important advancements each researcher is able to make, there's evidence that shows that that’s exponentially decaying.…

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