From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
An appreciation of entropy is necessary to grasp that we are not entitled to wellbeing, progress, comfort, or health. The forces of the universe are- at best, indifferent- at worse, antipathetic- to our interests. Left to their own devices, things get worse.
The scale of our damage on the animal world is unimaginable. We inflict pain and suffering on wild and domestic animals. We take away their wild lands and habitats, we use them to test our medicines and they're affected by climate change, pollution and many other aspects of our world.
even allowing for a margin of error of 5000%, there must be in our galaxy about 100 million stars which have planets of the right chemistry, dimensions, and temperature to support organic evolution.
I don't see the concept of offsetting as a valid or beneficial solution in the long run. We need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions. If you genuinely delve into the scientific data, it's clear that we are in a significantly dire situation, far more serious than the conventional media discourse would have you believe.
The only way to innovate is to follow Aristotle's prescription. To create a future that is different to the past is to imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made, not the one for which there is the most data. If companies want to innovate, they need to realise that data analytics is killing innovation yet is lauded and used increasingly.
Without quantum mechanics, we wouldn't have the modern world… we wouldn't have electronics… we wouldn't have understood the semi-conductor, the computer chip…. All of our modern technology relies on this mathematical description of the world of the very small.
To confront cancer is to encounter a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than we are. This image- of cancer as our desperate, malevolent, contemporary doppelganger- is so haunting because it is at least partly true.
Quantum mechanics is the most radical break in our thinking of reality that we have ever encountered. Quantum mechanics comes along and says that whole experience is misleading, and that the best you can ever do is to predict the probabilities of outcomes.
Diversity brings interesting ideas, interesting challenges and creativity. If there are too many females in a field, then get more men! If there are too many men in a field, get more women!
Mobile phones can really revolutionize the study of human behavior.