Wisdom in fragments

The way we should think about intelligence is in terms of a volume in a high-dimensional space.

The problem of our information society isn’t anymore that we don’t have access to information. It’s that we have actually too much information.

It was one of those typical examples of people combining different ideas from different fields and finding magic at that intersection.

The test for any belief isn't whether it makes you feel good. It's whether it makes you better at engaging with reality. That's not self-help. That's applied science.

We don't fail because we make mistakes; mistakes can be fixed. We fail because we quit. And we quit because belief collapsed, not because the strategy was wrong.

Strategy is, in large part, institutionalised belief. The question is whether your organisation has any mechanism for examining those beliefs — or whether they're just the water everyone swims in, invisible and unquestioned.

The phrase 'seeing is believing' has it exactly backwards. The research shows that believing is seeing.

If the sixty hours of capacity was always there in those rats — what are we writing off as fixed limits in human beings that are actually just locked potential waiting for the right belief?

Hope is active — it's a discipline. It would be such a profound disservice to give up: a disservice to young people, to the scientists who have spent decades working. There is no other option but to be hopeful. That is what activates me. There is simply no other option.

GDP mostly measures how money changes hands. War boosts GDP. Oil spills boost GDP. Cancer, bushfires, drug addiction, gambling addiction, health crises — these all boost GDP. It still rises when society is suffering immensely. We can put a carbon market on top of that, but we're still operating within an economic system built on a logic of destruction.

It is about talking to people in a language they understand. You need to be able to feel and connect with stories in order to act. The more stories we have, the more people we can reach — because everybody has different contexts, and different stories will speak to different people.

What we have isn't superior intelligence — it's superior destructive reach, enabled by technology. The story we've told ourselves that we are categorically separate from nature is the destabilising force, because every species is constrained by nature and is part of a system.

Nature is not the backdrop to our lives — it is our lives. We are nature and nature is us. There is no separation. We invented the ideology that we're exempt from nature's rules, that we're masters over nature, and that ideology is incorrect.

Essentially, corruption entails a misallocation of entrepreneurial talent into activities that carries individual benefit, but has destructive or unproductive consequences for society at large. Because of its essentially predatory nature, it reduces productive investment, leads to an outflow of talent, lowering growth rates and increasing income inequalities.

The countries that will grow fastest over the next few years will be those countries that have done the most during this past commodity and growth cycle to invest their gains in infrastructure and education and where the gains have been distributed is such a manner so that the middle class have been growing most substantially.

Monetary support for development in itself will not accelerate growth in the real economy to artificial or unsustainable levels. It is how the finance is used – or misused.