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Economists want their discipline to be a science, and they have nailed down a few precepts, but many of their debates are still clouded by ideology.

Nathan Myhrvold

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Nathan Myhrvold
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Author
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Mathematician
Paleontologist
Photographer
Seattle
Washington
Nathan Paul Myhrvold
Discipline
Nailed
Science
Precepts
Stills
Clouded
Still
Debates
Many
Economists
Economist
Ideology
Debate

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Chefs think about what it's like to make food. Being a scientist in the kitchen is about asking why something works, and how it works.
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The techniques of being an Internet visionary are just like those of lower-tech fortunetellers through the ages. A technological visionary must tell people what they want to hear, because your company's stock won't rise if you spout an unpopular vision to analysts.
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The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.
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The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.
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We're more familiar with what economists call an English auction - prices start low and rise as people bid. However, there is also the Dutch auction, where prices start high and go lower until somebody bites. Movies are sold to the audience via a very slow Dutch auction, where each phase between price drops can last weeks or months.
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A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.
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My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.
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Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs.
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Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.
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Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.
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When we first did 'Modernist Cuisine,' I think most people in cookbook publishing would have said, 'This is insane.'
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If your kitchen smells good, your food lost something.
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Microsoft, Apple, Facebook all bought huge patent portfolios to further their strategic game. They're doing what I'm doing!
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People get cranky when you burst their bubble. Over time, advances in astronomy have relentlessly reinforced the utter insignificance of Earth on a celestial scale. Fortunately, political and religious leaders stopped barbecuing astronomers for saying so, turning their spits with human-rights activists instead.
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Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.
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Software is a gas ! It expands to fit the container it is in !
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The reason societies with democratic governments are better places to live in than their alternatives isn't because of some goodness intrinsic to democracy, but because its hopeless inefficiency helps blunt the basic potential for evil.
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Micropayments are great if you use them for a product or service with certain properties. It must be one where you can get away with usage-based pricing, and where there is a strong rationale for making it cheap, yet not free.
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Elections, for their part, are typically popularity contests rather than measures of candidates' relative competency or effectiveness. Imagine if scientific truth were determined according to which scientist was most popular. To be successful, scientists would have to be charismatic and attractive - and human knowledge would suffer terribly.
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Why pay a fee for Internet content when a million free sites are just a click away? There's no incentive until people are too addicted to the Net to turn off their computers, yet are bored with what's available.
Nathan Myhrvold