There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanIt is the sinusoidal movement of economies between stage 1 and stage 2 which contributes to growth, while the participants in stage 3 very rarely contribute to any real economic growth as their entire theatre is virtual.
They have maternal instincts and look after each other as we do… it's not an intellectual thing when a mother protects her child; it's an instinctive behaviour. We value all those things in the human being because we are human beings! But that's pretty short sighted and narrow minded.
It is difficult to imagine a graver threat; or an area of human endeavour or global ecology in which the profound consequences of runaway climate change would not be disastrous. Already, it is estimated that around 300,000 people die every year as a direct result of climate change.
Our cognitive capability to reason has not evolved to find truth, it evolved to help us survive and that means that we sometimes find it easier to stay with a group rather than believe the correct thing.
Science can purify religion from error and superstition. Religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes...
Our brains are adept at concealing our motives from ourselves, convincing us that we are not as interested in status as we might actually be. This self-deception, paradoxically, enhances our ability to argue our lack of interest in status, which, in turn, can ironically increase our standing within the social group.
It's naïve to think that financial markets are not part of the battlefield.
There are all kinds of things where we can use technology to reflect our own humanity to better us.
Social media was kind-of created to destroy humanity, in a literal sense. The first notion of the implications of such networks was provided by B. F. Skinner who spoke of the dangers of people who- on networks- were too free, too creative and too uncontrolled.
The Trump phenomenon isn't just a blip—there's a genuine rupture across the Atlantic. So, what does that mean in practice? It means we need to protect some of our own sovereign infrastructure—our own sovereign cloud—especially for utilities, security, and intelligence.
People think that life inside Silicon Valley firms is like life under an orange tree, where you suck on the oranges and everyone treats each other perfectly – but that's not quite right… people are ruthless, competitive… human.
The happier I become with myself, the less I buy… the better my bank account becomes, because I'm not buying nonsense that I never needed.