This was a highly illuminating conversation. Firstly, I was most interested in performance contracts. As someone from the economics field, I am incredibly interested in new legal innovations in helping develop new market incentives that can transform the nature of our market economy. This particular innovation focuses on how to reward not just the cheapest bid at the auction but provide incentives for one to create durable projects where the rewards over time of such high-quality build are shared with both the buyer and seller. Secondly, collaboration among different disciplines is necessary for tackling an issue as critical as climate change, so it was interesting to listen to him elaborate upon one of the most important challenges of modern collaboration: the leader of the group will dominate the direction of the project, so even if one includes different disciplines in the team, the overwhelming influence may and has been so far from leaders in the STEM field. The two scientists in conversation clearly agreed they need more 'humanists' to lead and provide the direction. Thirdly, I am very interested in how societies verify accurate information. In the modern world, especially since we need a lot of cooperation from society to both trust science and demand their governments to take action based on said science. He talks about how people in the slums of Nairobi are able to verify and spread the word that someone is selling polluted water but they are more than ready to believe blatantly false information they encounter online. This insight must be acted upon and others such as this must be generated in order to understand how to win the PR war against the vested interests hoping to delay and/or block necessary government action. Link.
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