Lab-grown meat may never be cost-competitive enough to displace traditional meat
Obviously, he&#x27;s wrong. There are things we know, there are things we know that we don&#x27;t know, and, thirdly, there are things that we don&#x27;t know that we don&#x27;t know. Anyone betting against autonomous vehicles, fusion reactors, and similar hard challenges knows about that third part and will never say &quot;never&quot; - instead they pad their predictions with &quot;not soon,&quot; &quot;unlikely,&quot; etc. In contrast, this dude went full bore and just said &quot;no way we&#x27;ll ever get below $17 per pound.&quot; Again, there is definitionally no chance that the third aspect was baked into that prediction, so he&#x27;s either insanely naive or just financially incentivized to act that way. And then I found it:<p>&gt; Humbird’s job is to look into the crystal ball. He’s one of the experts NREL contracts to figure out which approaches are viable at scale, how much they would cost, and ultimately if the government should fund them.<p>Well, if you make it your job to give yes or no predictions, then you cannot take that third factor into account, because you would make it very clear to your employer that your work is absolutely worthless. Someone could have equally hired him 10 years ago to answer: &quot;how many man hours would it take to build a rocket that will take us to Mars?&quot; You think he would have said: &quot;no idea, that&#x27;s too unpredictable, we have to leave this to crazy people like Elon and then just see what happens?&quot; No, he would have happily spent the next 2 years writing a 100 page document that would spit out some random number between 10 and 10,000,000 years. And then he would lean on his PhD and call it a scientifically backed result.