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 BlattmanI think there's a big misconception—sometimes called 'toxic positivity' or 'good vibes only'—that a happy life is one where we only experience positive emotions. But that's just patently false. Evolutionarily speaking, our negative emotions serve a really important purpose: they cue us to take action.
The smallest male can be dominant based on his social skills. Think about it; nobody walks into a big store in London and assumes the biggest person is the boss! It might be the old man; it might be the young woman!
The most powerful stories come from genuine human connection. When you truly understand someone's experience, you can translate that into something universal that resonates with audiences everywhere.
I have learnt that situations in themselves are not inherently stressful. Our perception of situations is what creates stress for us. Some players thrive in the biggest sporting occasions and others struggle to cope.
We are wired to be afraid of uncertainty – it automatically hits us as instinctively wrong, like avoid this at all costs.
You've got around 2.6 billion people in the world who survive on less than $2 per day, 75% of them are rural and agriculture is their primary economic activity. Most are, however, mired in a form of subsistence farming that barely allows them to scrape-by.
The thing that makes us so unique is that we, unlike most every other species, have no niche. A niche is an opportunity which a species exploits- and our niche is niche switching. We move from one niche to another, even without major changes to our physical biology.
One of the defining experiences I had with CNET, a digital media company where I was the fourth employee back in the dawn of the internet, was recognizing the power of asking for help.
It's conceivable that survival odds were higher for ancestors who embraced false information endorsed by their tribe, compared to those who acknowledged empirically accurate information but were thereby alienated from their group.
Most people don't know who they are. They're trying to be what other people want them to be- or they're trying to create something that fills a void that comes from within. The pressure to conform is huge right now, especially with people getting cancelled; saying what you really feel can make you unpopular… so people box themselves into a place where they're not celebrated or respected for being truthful. It's tragic.
One of the best ways to make money is not to lose it. If you can learn not to lose money, you're making money. When you lose your own money, it hurts, it makes you careful, but you cannot let it take the mojo… the hunger out of you.
Among future technologies that may pose significant existential risks I would rank machine super intelligence at or near the top.