The World of Stories Humans experience the physical world, but also live in the world of stories (money, gods, nations, corporations). Technology in the next century will likely make these fictions more powerful. Our ability to tell stories started during the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years ago – when we could talk about things that existed … Read more
Why do humans think they are superior to animals? Is There a Human Spark? Scientists have not found that humans or animals have souls, but scientists doubt the existence of souls not because of lack of evidence but because the idea of “soul” contradicts fundamental principles of evolution. This is why the theory of evolution … Read more
The Garden of Eden In the Garden of Eden myth, humans are punished for their curiosity and wish to gain knowledge. God expels them from paradise. But in the myth about Newton and the apple, nobody berates the scientist for his efforts – just the opposite. Teachers all over the world propagate the story of … Read more
The End of Homo Sapiens Across time, wars have become responsible for less deaths. Sugar has become more dangerous than gunpowder. Whereas in ancient agricultural societies human violence caused about 15 per cent of all deaths, during the twentieth century violence caused only 5 per cent of deaths, and in the early twenty-first century it … Read more
Rational about Rationality You don’t need science to survive, but you need to survive to do science. The best definition of rationality: actions that increase the chances of survival. Herbert Simon formulated the idea of bounded rationality; we can’t deal with the world as if we were a computer – we need shortcuts and distortions … Read more
My lifetime motto is that mathematicians think in (well, precisely defined and mapped) objects and relations, jurists and legal thinkers in constructs, logicians in maximally abstract operators, and…fools in words. Words have ambiguous meanings – this is bad for decision making. Philosophy was born out of the need for rigor in discourse – Socrates asked … Read more
Taleb’s point in Skin in the Game can be summed up with this observation. Anyone who needs to appease his colleagues to make progress, or his superiors, or deal with commentators, will have to take on the role of an actor, and by doing so, they trade results in the real world for their position … Read more
Jesus was a risk taker In Christianity, it would have been easier to separate Jesus from God, but there was an insistence on the Trinity. The duality of Jesus (being both man and God) is central, and has caused monotheists to see traces of polytheism in Christianity and Christians to be beheaded by the Islamic … Read more
The Skin of Employees Employees exist because they have a lot of skin in the game, they share risk with their employers – enough for it prevent them from being undependable. With employees, you are buying dependability. And dependability is a driver behind many transactions. People of some means have a country house—which is inefficient … Read more
An intolerant minority will set the rules for everyone else. People in the U.S eat Kosher food not because most of the U.S is Jewish, but because non-Jews tolerate Kosher while Jews don’t tolerate non-Kosher. This asymmetry informs us about what will happen with GMO’s. Companies can promote genetically modified food, but it only takes … Read more