Matt Ridley
Article
Matt Ridley is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between May 21, 2021 and July 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “How Innovation Works , by Matt Ridley”; “see How Innovation Works , by Matt Ridley”; “Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic”. It most often appears alongside China, India, ACX.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: May 21, 2021
- Last seen: July 24, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- China (3 shared issues)
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- India (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- Argentina (2 shared issues)
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- Australia (2 shared issues)
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- Canada (2 shared issues)
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- French (2 shared issues)
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- Japan (2 shared issues)
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- Soviet Union (2 shared issues)
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- Taiwan (2 shared issues)
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- UK (2 shared issues)
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- Wall Street (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
3 For a deeper dive into this than Zeihan gives, see How Innovation Works, by Matt Ridley. These two tell very similar stories about wealth creation and what it is that gives us the modern world. Zeihan mentions the productivity cycle progressing through incremental improvements in technology, and suggests that this cycle is the source of economic growth. That’s essentially the thesis of Ridley’s latest book.
Inline links: 3
Alina Chan and Matt Ridley’s Viral is a book about the investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. In case you haven’t been following, there’s been a shift in the scientific consensus on this topic. For about the first year of the pandemic, it was widely accepted that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, had a natural origin, meaning that it first spread to humans naturally from an animal (also called a zoonotic origin). Any suggestion that it could have come from a lab was dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Then, sometime around spring 2021 something changed. Well-known, respected scientists began to voice the opinion that SARS-CoV-2 might have come from a lab, or that it’s at least a plausible hypothesis that deserves an investigation. The scientific consensus abruptly shifted from “definitely natural origin” to “both natural origin and lab origin are viable hypotheses that should be investigated.”
Inline links: Well-known, respected scientists
27: Another lab leak debate, this one between author Matt Ridley and virologist Steven Goldstein. Ridley (lab leak) won by 65% to 12% of the audience (I don’t know what the audience believed beforehand). The debate seems strictly worse than the one I covered, so I’m not updating. [Update: it started ~51%-15%, thanks Complaint]
Inline links: Another lab leak debate, Complaint