From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
One of the themes which is perhaps more important in the intellectual rather than practical world was the excessive love affair that people in the financial world had with the efficient markets hypothesis. If you take that literally, there can't be bubbles. Who can believe that now?
There's a risk of underestimation if we only count the easily quantifiable elements. It's easy to dismiss minute pathways as insignificant due to their size, but with an infinite number, their collective impact can be substantial.
Conservatives and liberals are wandering around with different brains. They have different tools with which to apprehend the world, and therefore they are seeing different worlds — which inform the politics that emanate from that experience.
The discovery of an effective HIV vaccine is the nirvana for all our efforts to prevent AIDS.
We have a growing inequality of rationality. At the top, we've never been so rational – we've accomplished technological miracles… we sequenced the COVID-19 genome in days and deployed vaccines in under a year… we're travelling to space.
Science is a learning experience. We are interacting with nature, collecting evidence, and sometimes nature is more imaginative than we are. We ought to be humble when collective evidence, and not assume we know the answer in advance. Many of the realities we create are designed to flatter our ego... We prefer to attach ourselves to virtual realities that flatter us, and that's driven by ego.
We get more energy from air than from food or drink. So, if we're absorbing that energy inefficiently, it's bound to catch up to us. A useful analogy is food: you can survive on a diet of 12 cookies a day, getting enough calories, but it's not nourishing, nor does it allow your body to operate efficiently.
If you tap out the rhythm to a familiar song, say 'happy birthday…' how often do you think that someone listening to your taps will guess the song? The person tapping usually guesses about 50%, but in reality, it's about 2.5%! You are assuming the other person can hear the song you are tapping!
What we see in the science is something very different. We often see that romantic partners basically see the best in each other. They're wearing rose-coloured glasses. And the primary thing that brings people together is what we would call attachment bonds or pair bonds: the idea that people are looking for somebody who they feel has their back, somebody who's going to celebrate their successes, and somebody who's going to be there for them.
We have no idea about the world that we inhabit and that what the brain is doing is really creating an entire shortcut that enables us to understand the world without being able to physically really understand the reality in which we inhabit, which is a mind-blowing concept.
Quantum mechanics is a consistent mathematical structure, not that difficult to understand in itself, which nature has chosen. The confusing thing is that nature chose something that doesn't feel intuitive to us. It has a reputation for being mystifying mainly because of its history rather than what it really is as a theory.
Many biologists I speak to would say it's almost incomprehensible that something as complex as us has even appeared at all—we might just be very lucky. Or maybe it normally only takes a few hundred million years to go from life to intelligence, and we were just slow. We have a sample size of one.