“A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.”— J. Doyne Farmer
The quote archive
A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.
Complex societies needed repetitive rituals in order to get off the ground. Routinizing rituals makes deviations from the standard script easy to detect. And this means that when people step out of line, they can be sanctioned.
— Harvey WhitehouseCognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms
One of the psychological effects of that is it can blur the boundaries between self and group and create this feeling that you are the group, and the group is you. And this obviously has the capacity to promote quite strong forms of pro-group action.
— Harvey WhitehouseCognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms
Social synchrony is a big feature of human behaviour—it's a weird thing if you think about it, but we do things like marching in time and parading and singing in choirs in ways that are highly coordinated and synchronised.
— Harvey WhitehouseCognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms
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.
— Harvey WhitehouseCognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms
We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
— Harvey WhitehouseCognitive scientist studying ritual, religion, and social bonding mechanisms
The French Revolution really is this incredible hinge in the story of Western political thought. For a long time, it was just taken for granted that the French Revolution was the starting point of political modernity.
— Dan EdelsteinFor thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. There was really a sense that humanity had already reached its peak, and so the question wasn't what comes next that's better, but rather how to prevent decline and loss.
— Dan EdelsteinThe industrial age was designed around one group of people making decisions, and a different group carrying them out. That mindset still lingers in our language — 'leaders' and 'followers,' 'blue collar' and 'management,' 'union' and 'executive.' It splits the world into thinkers and doers. That no longer works.
— L. David MarquetFormer Navy submarine captain and author of "Turn the Ship Around!
Status hierarchies help us navigate choices which would otherwise be impossibly complex. It dramatically reduces the cognitive load we face in making decisions.
— Toby E. StuartIf you get just a little bit of a head start, you can end up racing far ahead. So you end up with very small differences in quality or merit that get amplified over careers or competitions, eventually becoming very large differences over time.
— Toby E. StuartSocial platforms are bizarrely distortive of how the social world works—soon to be topped by AI, which I think will be even more fundamentally, and even more bizarrely, distortive. What these platforms do is take local phenomena and turn them into global phenomena.
— Toby E. StuartStatus is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't.
— Toby E. StuartThe truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'
— Jay IngramCanadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet
The problem is you cannot achieve all three E's simultaneously. Early work in the subfield of market design shows it's very hard and very unlikely you'll get a hidden market that can successfully allocate things efficiently and equitably in a way that's also easy.
— Judd B. KesslerWithout understanding the rules of the game, you might assume that your outcomes are determined mostly by luck. People who end up unhappy about what they get conclude that they were unlucky or that the system was rigged against them. After enough of these experiences, they believe that's just how the world works.
— Judd B. KesslerWe often talk about misinformation and disinformation, but the deeper issue is the speed and flow of trust, because we're responding to feeling rather than expertise and credibility.
— Rachel BotsmanAuthor & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption