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 BlattmanComedy chips at people in power, particularly those who use tyrannical power. It strips their fake respect, and destroys the fake fear they create; and these are people who rely on being respected, and being feared.
We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life.
Everyone has important skills and likely unique skills, but they may not always be as confident in those skills as they should be. We need to challenge the notion that if you don't feel like a superhero, then you must not be the right person for the job. Being underestimated in that way often brings out the best in me. For me, it's not just about overcoming insecurity but leveraging it as a catalyst to ensure that I bring everything I have to the mission.
I'm particularly interested in the human propensity to copy behaviours that lack any kind of knowable causal structure. This is how we learn arbitrary conventions—and I think it originates in a distinctively human way of building group identities. I describe ritual actions as causally opaque. We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
In line with most highly-tuned talents, I absolutely believe that entrepreneurship is a genetic gift that you're born with. What you do with that gift depends on your upbringing, opportunities and inspirations; you either make them massively better or neglect them.
It's awareness that leads to regulation—that's why it's information. Because it's giving us information about how we're feeling and what we need to do about those feelings.
One of the things I love most about my job is the diversity in the pace of work across the organization. I truly enjoy being with people from different parts of the world and working with individuals who operate on completely different approaches.
We have made money, capital, materialism and consumption into our God, it's a disease – you could call it affluenza. It is perhaps because of this context that humanity has lost its way, and the consideration of human rights has been subordinated to the interests of a handful of powerful people who sit at the top of the pyramid.
I think the scale is potentially huge. Frankly, this is one of the reason why investigation is so important. The best approach is to keep an open mind and let the investigation go where it may.
While some criticize them as being overly individualistic, I believe there's a subtle yet undeniable transition from the 'me' mindset to a collective 'we' approach. The profound 'co' concept I foresee is what I term 'co-destiny,' rooted in socially energized capital.
The question as to whether we are alone has been asked by humans almost since they first crawled out of the cave! For millennia we used to ask the priests, philosophers or shaman- whoever we thought was wise- how to answer that question. They always came back with a belief system. What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb 'to believe' we're trying to use the verb 'to explore'. We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.
We see math as code and code as math. The real magic, and the key transition, comes from combining AI, programming languages, and mathematics—bringing all three pillars together. What we envision is humans using informal reasoning and intuition as a powerful guide, with formal systems then verifying those ideas. That interplay across layers is, I think, the real magic of combining multiple levels of abstraction.