Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
âYou never want to compete with somebody who is obsessed.â bigthink.com/business/how-to-win-the-long-game-figâŚ
Read more in Eric Markowitz's newsletter, The Nightcrawler, every Friday evening. New issue out tomorrow.
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This is possibly the largest, oldest, and heaviest living thing on Earth: bigthink.com/strange-maps/humongous-fungus-in-oregâŚ
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What evidence would you need to see in order to change your mind, even fractionally? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfAUb... âŞ@samharrisorgâŹ
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"Fascism is a cult of the leader, who promises national restoration in the face of supposed humiliation by immigrants, leftists, liberals, minorities, homosexuals, women, in the face of what the fascist leader says is a takeover of the country's media, cultural institutions, schools by these forces. And that's why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response."
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Pick your fights wisely. You wonât have energy for them all. Two-time world champion debater Bo Seo asks 4 key questions before taking on an argument. Here is his âRISAâ framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WjUF...
⢠(R) Is it real?
⢠(I) Is it important?
⢠(S) Is it specific enough?
⢠(A) Are you aligned?
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Andrew Ross Sorkin: Have you talked to folks like Sam Altman who runs OpenAI or the folks at Microsoft â I know Bill Gates was a big fan of your books in the past â or the folks at Google? What do they say when you discuss this with them and do you trust them as humans when you've met them? Do you go, "I trust you, Sam Altman."
Yuval Noah Harari: Most of them are afraid. They understand--
Sorkin: Afraid of you, or afraid of AI?
Harari: No, afraid of what they are doing, afraid of what is happening. They understand better than anybody else the potential, including the destructive potential, of what they are creating. And they are very afraid of it.
At the same time, their basic schtick is that "I'm a good guy and I'm very concerned about it. Now, you have these other guys â they are bad, they don't have the same kind of responsibility that I have. So it would be very bad for humanity if they create it first. So I must be the one who creates it first. And you can trust me that, that I will know â I will at least do my best to keep it under..." And everybody is saying it. And I think that to some extent they're genuine about it.
There is of course also this another element in there of extreme kind of pride and hubris that they are doing the most important thing in, basically, not just the history of humanity, the history of life.
Sorkin: Do you think they are?
Harari: They could be, yes. If you think about the timeline of the universe, at least as far as we know it â so you have basically two stops: First stop, 4 billion years ago, the first organic life forms emerge on planet Earth. And then for 4 billion years, nothing major happens. Like for 4 billion years, it's more of the same, it's more organic stuff. So you have amoebas and you have dinosaurs and you have humans, but it's all organic. And then here comes Elon Musk or Sam Altman and does the second important thing in the history of the universe: the beginning of inorganic evolution. Because AI is just at the very, very beginning of its evolutionary process. It's basically like 10 years old, 15 years old. We haven't seen anything yet. GPT-4 and all these things, they are the amoebas of AI evolution. And who knows how the AI dinosaurs are going to look like. But the name on the inflection point of the history of the universe, if that name is Elon Musk or that name is Sam Altman, that's a big thing.
Watch the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfid5...
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The rise and reign of mammals, explained â here's why the reptile planet became the human planet: https://youtu.be/YC2qoeWYr4w?si=jICtX...
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Youâve heard of Occamâs razor. Have you heard of Occamâs broom? Daniel Dennett wrote:
âThe molecular biologist [Sydney] Brenner recently invented a delicious play on Occamâs Razor, introducing the new term Occamâs Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another. This is our first boom crutch, an anti-thinking tool, and you should keep your eyes peeled for it.
âThe practice is particularly insidious when used by propagandists who direct their efforts at the lay public, because like Sherlock Holmesâs famous clue about the dog that didnât bark in the night, the absence of a fact that has been swept off the scene by Occamâs Broom is unnoticeable except by expertsâŚ
âConspiracy theorists are masters of Occamâs Broom, and an instructive exercise on the Internet is to look up a new conspiracy theory, to see if you (a nonexpert on the topic) can find the flaws, before looking elsewhere on the web for the expert rebuttals.
âWhen Brenner coined the term, he wasnât talking about creationism and conspiracy theories; he was pointing out that in the heat of battle, even serious scientists sometimes cannot resist âoverlookingâ some data that seriously undermine their pet theory. Itâs a temptation to be resisted, no matter what.â
â Daniel Dennett, âIntuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinkingâ
Read more: bigthink.com/the-learning-curve/3-brilliant-criticâŚ
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Timeless advice from Charlie Munger.
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âWhen you think about the long history of life on Earth, you might think, well, it's been this progression â almost as though it had a direction, almost had a purpose.
âNot at all.
âIt's an incredible series of accidents that's given us the world we know today. And this is really a deep philosophical rub for humanity.
âFor millennia, philosophers and theologians have asked the question, "Does everything happen for a reason or do some things happen by chance?" And I would really say it's only about the last 60 years or so that scientists would be saying: Oh my goodness, it's a remarkable series of events that were required for us to be here, and that so many things could have happened in a different way that we wouldn't be here at all â both individually for sure and certainly as a species.
âIn human fertilization, there's about 100 million sperm on average and those 100 million sperm are carrying all sorts of genetic combinations from the father, and that one individual egg is carrying one out of about eight million different genetic combinations from the mother. So when that one lucky sperm makes it and combines with that one egg at that moment, that's about a 1-in-70-trillion event, genetically speaking.â â Biologist Sean B Carroll
Learn more about the incredible luck of humanity as a species in the full video: 'What are the chances of YOU existing? A biologist explains' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC2qo...
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