120 Quotes by Ramez Naam

There are really two kinds of optimism. There's the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says "don't worry - everything will be just fine" and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there's what we call dynamic optimism. That's an optimism based on action.

When you're managing a large number of people, you learn that incentives matter tremendously. You really want people to be rewarded for doing the right thing for the customers and the organization.

Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.

I'm a computer scientist by training. I'm also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, 'The Infinite Resource,' I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.

Orange juice from concentrate is labeled. Food coloring Red #5 is labeled. Fish are labeled as to whether they've been previously frozen. To a consumer, there's no plausible reason why these factors should be on a food ingredient label while the presence of GMOs shouldn't be.

I support GMOs. And we should label them. We should label them because that is the very best thing we can do for public acceptance of agricultural biotech. And we should label them because there's absolutely nothing to hide.

In the end, our minds and their ability to create new ideas are the ultimate source of all human wealth. That's a resource nearly without limit.

Wild fish are under threat of extinction because they're hunted to feed us. Yet land animals that we farm are under no threat of extinction. Shifting from hunting fish to farming fish - where the farmers have the incentive to keep their stocks healthy - could do a tremendous amount of good for wild fish.

I'm a geek through and through. My last job at Microsoft was leading much of the search engine relevance work on Bing. There we got to play with huge amounts of data, with neural networks and other AI techniques, with massive server farms.