The Wizard and the Prophet

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1. lelandfeNov 2026
   A good story that touches on this is the Wizard and the Prophet, covering Norman Borlaug's efforts to crossbreed wheat that wasn't too tall, was resistant to blight, etc.
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2. belochMay 2026
   Check out Charles C. Man's "The Wizard and the Prophet". In this book, a wizard is someone who approaches a problem with technological innovation. A prophet is someone who approaches it with societal transformation, usually involving sacrifice by the masses.

   e.g. Malthus (and others) observed that human populations were growing exponentially, but crop-land is a finite resource. Humanity seemed doomed to starvation in just a few short generations. As a prophet, Malthus tried to get people to stop having so many children. Other prophets repeated this effort multiple times, always warning of an apocalypse that was just a few decades away. Meanwhile, wizards tried spreading bat guano on fields and started breeding new varieties of wheat, rice, etc.. The result has been a continual stream of innovation that has led to the world's food supply growing faster than its population. Yet, the warning of the prophets remains sound. There's an ultimate limit.

   Humans seem hardwired to both be and love prophets while totally failing to follow their advice. Prophets have been warning us to reduce our energy use, eat local, bicycle everywhere, etc.. Some of us do some of these things some of the time, but not nearly enough to make a real difference. Wizards have gotten solar and wind to the point where they're economically viable enough to supplant coal and internal combustion engines, and that is making a huge difference.

   Prophets are valuable for identifying problems, such as AI, but their demands for abstinence and self-sacrifice usually don't gain much traction. It's when the wizards show up that things usually start cooking.

   Prophets have identified AI as a problem and are calling for limits, but history has shown that not nearly enough people are likely to listen. How might a wizard approach the problem in a way that lets people keep doing their thing without the world ending? The pace of AI development is so quick that we also have to ask, is there enough time for the wizards to do their thing?

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   EDIT: On the bright side, while the rapidity of the AI revolution seems utterly unprecedented, so too is the concentration of power in those who control it. The prophets really only need to convince or coerce a handful of billionaires in order to buy the world's wizards years or decades.

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3. spenroseJan 2026
   This perspective dates to at least 1940, when the population was a fraction of the current size. The fantastic Charles C. Mann wrote an excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, about it.

   Regarding water specifically, we now have multiple desalination projects of 1MM m^3/day, enough to support a city of 4MM people. They are expensive, but getting cheaper, and real (rich) polities in the Middle East are relying on them.

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4. estsauverDec 2025
   Sure—I’ll try!

   > So you are saying that these special hybrid seeds that are the first generation of combining two strains are the only ones that can perform well?

   For a lot of crop systems, yes! There are obviously crop systems where you can do clones and some exceptions are always present in biology, but basically yes. Yes for all the big staple crops except Canola.

   > And that using any other seeds, even the second generation of that same strain, is so bad and so easy to confuse that it should be outright illegal?

   I probably wouldn’t make it illegal, I think farmers should be allowed to do whatever they want to! (My completely out of the loop guess is the government is trying to help small holder farmers who are reporting that they’re being scammed by these groups and that they lack the resources to do genetic testing to prosecute them for the fraud.)

   > That is very hard to believe. Such laws are in place to protect the IP of these special seed producers, to make their business model viable. That does have merit to a degree, you do want such companies to exist, but they should also have to contend with competition from other, perhaps less effective but cheaper, sources of seed.

   It’s not really an IP protection thing, it’s an extremely difficult many year process to recover genetics on most hybrid crop systems. I don’t think most seed companies care about folks using saved seed, they know almost all farmers will buy good seed if they can.

   > This doesn’t have much to do with protecting the farmers from being cheated into planting bad seed. And I am skeptical of the fact that even second generation seeds are that bad, or that these hybrids are really such a life-changing upgrade.

   I think well answered by a parent comment, but the book The Wizard and The Prophet is pretty good reading on Borlaug and the green revolution. If you look at global food capacity vs population, it’s probably the single most important life upgrade for everyone of modernity.

   (Small Edit: I should note that I’m not an agronomist, I’m just a guy who codes okay sometimes and that I’ve gotten to spend a lot of time talking to agronomists and smallholder farmers trying to make agriculture for small farmers work better.)

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5. belochDec 2025
   "The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C Mann sets up an interesting duality that I think more people should be aware of.

   Mann describes "Prophets" as people who see a problem and then try to prod people to change their behaviour in order to avoid it. e.g. Thomas Malthus observed that exponential population growth had humanity on track to experience severe famine, conflict, etc. that would violently and savagely bring our numbers back within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Multiple people have made predictions about when humanity would reach the brink at numerous points in the years since Malthus, but were always wrong about when the Malthusian trap would finally spring...

   ...because of "Wizards". Wizards are people who set about solving problems with tech. Advances like the use of fertilizer, first bat guano and then the Haber-Bosch process, followed by scientific crop breeding have effectively raised the carrying capacity of the Earth so much that, despite our exponentially ballooning numbers, there are far more calories per person available now than in Malthus' day.

   Prophets are valuable for their ability to observe and raise awareness about problems. The Earth does have an ultimate carrying capacity too, which we should keep in mind even if we don't know what it is. However, the track record undeniably favours the Wizards. They get things done. Prophets hate this, because it makes it look like they were wrong. They weren't wrong. They were just too focused on an approach to the problem that rarely works.

   The modern environmentalist movement is dominated by prophets. So much so, that wizards are often portrayed as the enemy. History has shown that this is wrong-headed. We should value prophets for what they do, but ignore them when they tell us not to fund the wizards.

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6. lelandfeOct 2025
   If you haven’t read it, I loved The Wizard and the Prophet and think about it a lot
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