brettworks

“The thing is our physiology is really smart. I mean, it’s just really smart. It’s very hard to trick your physiology. We live in a 3D world, we move in a 3D world. So if we make mistakes in our movement, we die. So we have much higher standards in our physiology than we do our psychology. And so these signals can be incredibly valuable.”

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. Which means what’s really important is to understand what the main thing really is, in a situation when there’s eighty-four symptoms and indicators flying around—what’s really the main thing here? And be sure you’re adequately focused on getting that right, rather than getting whipsawed every which way.”

“Strictly speaking, optimism is [an] error. But it cancels out other errors.”

John Coates, Kathryn Sullivan, and Paul Graham in Nate Silver, On The Edge (2024)

“What information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. Horoscopes put lovers in astrological formations, propaganda broadcasts put voters in political formations, and marching songs put soldiers in military formations.

As a paradigmatic case, consider music. Most symphonies, melodies, and tunes don’t represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music. Without representing anything, music nevertheless does a remarkable job in connecting large numbers of people and synchronizing their emotions and movements. Music can make soldiers march in formation, clubbers sway together, church congregations clap in rhythm, and sports fans chant in unison.”

Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus (2024)