From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Older generations give their trust to experts and influencers based on who and what: credibility, qualifications, and institutional affiliations. Younger generations, by contrast, trust based on how someone makes them feel. And you can manipulate that incredibly effectively in 15 seconds of video: the music, the mood, the atmosphere.
Being able to trust is actually what makes us human. It's a very innate thing. And often, distrust and mistrust are learned behaviours that start to set in around the age of four.
Negotiation is really a life skill, and it's essential in this day and age.
The vast majority of people- if they can benefit from something or make some money, will look the other way. It's personal greed, without thought about the consequences.
For 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.
The concentration of power in technology corporations is a moral and political problem that we simply don't have a precedent for. More people use Facebook than speak English for example, so the implications of Facebook, as just one platform, are at the scale of language itself.
we even regulate toy guns, by requiring orange tips — but lawmakers don't have the gumption to stand up to National Rifle Association extremists and regulate real guns as carefully as we do toys….
One is: Do I trust you with my feelings? Do I think that you're going to be a listener who is non-judgmental, or do I think you're going to judge me—'Marc is weak because he's anxious,' or 'Marc is a man and he's feeling sad; dudes don't feel sad.' So if I think you're going to judge me for my feelings, I'm going to be much more guarded about whether or not I express them.
Silence is, by definition, an absence—an absence of voice, opinion, and life. It begins so subtly that it often goes unnoticed. We start by withdrawing or withholding our genuine thoughts from conversations, replacing them with what we presume others want to hear. As it continues, silence essentially means we cannot fully be ourselves. We find ourselves editing parts of who we are, censoring our thoughts and feelings—and we do this to each other, often without realizing it.
My fear has never been the machines waking up and deciding to do away with us, but rather that we- in our own bone headed way- deploy systems inappropriately, or without thinking through the unintended consequences that may occur.
It is essential to think about it systematically and to include demographics as it's the study of people – who we are, where we are- people are the foundation of every society. There is a lot of misunderstanding about demography and one of the biggest misunderstandings is that it's destiny. If it's, destiny, it is not that interesting to study, but it's not destiny.
If our senses are really how we understand the world, and there are differences in those sensory windows, then our internal world will be different. Perhaps these differences explain the diversity of beliefs.