Quote of the Day

Ants have a powerful caste system. A colony typically contains ants that carry out radically different roles and have markedly different body structures and behaviors. These roles, Reinberg learned, are often determined not by genes but by signals from the physical and social environment. 'Sibling ants, in their larval stage, become segregated into the different types based on environmental signals,' he said. 'Their genomes are nearly identical, but the way the genes are used—turned on or off, and kept on or off—must determine what an ant "becomes." It seemed like a perfect system to study epigenetics. And so Shelley and I caught a flight to Arizona to see Jürgen Liebig, the ant biologist, in his lab.

The collaboration between Reinberg, Berger, and Liebig has been explosively successful—the sort of scientific story ('two epigeneticists walk into a bar and meet an entomologist') that works its way into a legend. Carpenter ants, one of the species studied by the team, have elaborate social structures, with queens (bullet-size, fertile, winged), majors (bean-size soldiers who guard the colony but rarely leave it), and minors (nimble, grain-size, perpetually moving foragers). In a recent, revelatory study, researchers in Berger’s lab injected a single dose of a histone-altering chemical into the brains of major ants. Remarkably, their identities changed; caste was recast. The major ants wandered away from the colony and began to forage for food. The guards turned into scouts. Yet the caste switch could occur only if the chemical was injected during a vulnerable period in the ants’ development.

[...]

The impact of the histone-altering experiment sank in as I left Reinberg’s lab and dodged into the subway. [...] All of an ant’s possible selves are inscribed in its genome. Epigenetic signals conceal some of these selves and reveal others, coiling some, uncoiling others. The ant chooses a life between its genes and its epigenes—inhabiting one self among its incipient selves.

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

Wisdom Of The Week

 I would suggest some slightly different tips, admittedly not for everyone in all situations:

1. Set up the conversational premise so you, and the other person, have easy outs, if it is not a good match.
2. Don’t assume the conversation will last an hour.  Rapidly signal what kind of conversation you are good at, if anything going overboard in the preferred direction, again to establish whether the proper conversational match is in place.
3. If you notice something you want to say, say it.
4. Be worthy of a good conversation.

Rinse and repeat.  I would stress the basic point that most conversations are bad, so your proper goal is to make them worse (so they can end) rather than better.

What is conversation for anyway?  I don’t even recommend being charming, or trying to be charming, unless a work situation is forcing you to do so.  Let yourself be sullen when the mood beckons.  Feel free to let eye contact lapse.  Don’t repeat back what you’ve heard.  Say something surprising.  Be willing to go meta.  Most of all, try to establish a “we actually can have a more genuine conversation than we thought was going to be possible” level of understanding, taking whatever chances are needed to get to that higher level of discourse.

By the way, do not use alcohol, not if you wish to learn something or maximize your powers of discrimination.

- Tyler Cown on How to Have a Good Conversation

Quote of the Day

Good health and good sense are two of life’s greatest blessings.

- Publilius Syrus

Quote of the Day

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

- Joyce Meyer

Quote of the Day

In your actions, don’t procrastinate. In your conversations, don’t confuse. In your thoughts, don’t wander. In your soul, don’t be passive or aggressive. In your life, don’t be all about business.

- Marcus Aurelius

What I’ve Been Reading

Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.

I highly recommend to start with Jonathan Haidt’s earlier books, his TED talk's and this Atlantic cover story which was the precursor to this book.  If someone doesn’t “get” the idea presented in this book then clearly this is book is for you or your kids (unless you are living like Captain America). Thank you both for writing this timely and much needed book.

The book revolves around these three Great Untruths:

• The Untruth of Fragility: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker

• The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always Trust Your Feelings

• The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life Is a Battled Between Good People and Evil People 

Quote of the Day

Bad things necessarily have causes. This is not so true of good things.

- Gregory Bateson

Quote of the Day

My theory, Warren, is if it can’t stand a little mismanagement, it’s no business.

- Charlie Munger

Quote of the Day

As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.

- Marcus Aurelius

Quote of the Day

The greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.

- Arthur Schopenhauer

What I’ve Been Reading

Morality doesn't mean "following divine commands". It means "reduce sufferings." Therefore in order to act morally, you don't need believe in any myth of story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation for suffering. If you really understand how an action causes unnecessary suffering to yourself or to others, you will naturally abstain from it.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari.

As I started the book, I felt a 3rd book in 3 years was too soon since some of the initial chapters were repetitive. But within an hour or so, I fell for his lucid writing. Harari is one of those gifted writers who can think and write clearly in the simplest of terms.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you have spread fictions. If you want to know truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things - for example sources of your own power - that will anger allies, dishearten followers, or undermine social harmony. Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma. Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments - whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues - placed unity above truth. That’s why they are powerful. 

Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. It is easier to manipulate a river by building a dam than it is to predict all the complex consequences this will have for the wider ecological system.

Yet the real problem with robots is exactly the opposite. We should fear them because they will probably always obey their masters and never rebel.

The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.  If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.

The attempt to replace small groups of people who actually know one another with the imagined communities of nations and political parties will never succeed in full.

Species often split but never merge. Human tribes, in contrast, tend to coalesce over time into larger and larger groups.

No doubt we will have huge arguments and bitter conflicts over these questions. But these arguments and conflicts are unlikely to isolate us from one another. Just the opposite. They will make us ever more interdependent. Though humankind is very far from constituting a harmonious community, we are all members of a single rowdy global civilization.

The victory of science has been so complete that our very idea of religion has changed. We no longer associate religion with farming and medicine. Even many zealots now suffer from collective amnesia and prefer to forget that traditional religions ever laid claim to those domains.

Secular education teaches children to distinguish truth from belief, to develop compassion for all suffering beings, to appreciate the wisdom and experience of all the earth’s denizens, to think freely without fearing the unknown, and to take responsibility for their actions and world as a whole. 

As we come to make the most important decisions in the history of life, I personally would trust more in those who admit ignorance than in those who claim infallibility. If you want your religion, ideology, or wolrdview to lead the world, my first question to you be “What was the biggest mistake your religion, ideology, or worldview committed? What did it get wrong?” If you cannot come up with something serious, I for one would not trust you. 

I find it difficult to answer even the simplest questions, such as where my lunch comes from, who made the shoes I’m wearing, and what my pension fund is doing with my money. 

The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed but even more so from ignorance and indifference. 

So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is. The answer isn’t a story. 

Quote of the Day

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Wisdom Of The Week

The book is called Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition, and it’s by arguably the most acute conservative thinker of his generation, Roger Scruton. It’s a slim, concise monograph, and it begins with the truth that conservatism is a branch of liberalism, and not its enemy. It is the branch that tries to conserve the liberal democratic state against the corrosive effects and flaws of liberalism itself (not to speak of leftism and reactionism, which seek to overthrow liberalism entirely). More to the point, it does not defend liberalism as a function of natural rights, or of human rights, or self-evident truths, but simply as the inheritance of a particular place in a particular sliver of human history: the Anglo-American world in the last two and a half centuries.

[---]

Conservatism began then as a defense of America and a critique of France — which is the essence of Edmund Burke’s formative argument. He saw the advent of democracy as a challenge — which demanded acute attention as hierarchies collapsed, and society changed, in order to ensure that too much of value wasn’t thrown away. And so it emphasized the importance of a vibrant and autonomous civil society (independent of government), the centrality of federalism, local community, and voluntary association of the kind that Tocqueville marveled at and saw as the indispensable complement to the atomizing, destabilizing forces that America had also unleashed.

Conservatism’s defense of the free market and free trade was therefore never absolute. In fact, there’s more protectionism in conservatism’s past than many would like to admit. But these market mechanisms were nonetheless the least worst way to discern the value of things traded and sold, and were never supposed to be ends in themselves or to be advanced regardless of the impact on society. In fact, for conservatism, society is for no end and no purpose; it is valuable simply in itself, as the combination of traditions, landscapes, communities, and customs that define a nation, bind us together as citizens, and make us feel at home.

And yes, that feeling of being at home is nebulous. It is in many ways sub-rational. Ask ordinary people to describe it and they will often not be articulate. Sometimes, it manifests itself as bigotry, yes. Most of the time, it is about loss, and mourning it, while understanding that change is inevitable. Burke famously saw society not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract between generations: to pass on to the future the good and viable things we inherited from the past. This emphatically does not mean resistance to all change. In fact, it understands some change as critical to conservation. And perhaps that’s where American conservatism began to go wrong. The goal is not to stand athwart history and cry “Stop!”, as William F. Buckley put it. It’s to be part of the stream of history and say: slow it down a bit, will you?

In Scruton’s account, the list of conservative intellectuals is long and distinguished. The respective geniuses of Burke and Hume and Hegel are integral to its formation; they were succeeded by the Romantic era that urged a corrective to mass industrialization, and a hedge to the Enlightenment’s preference for theoretical reason over the practical wisdom that works, as Adam Smith saw it, as an invisible hand in guiding society. Tradition, conservatives believe, is a form of collective knowledge. It can contain wisdom that reason simply cannot grasp.

[---]

This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.

I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association.

- Andrew Sullivan

Quote of the Day

Garlic is divine. Few food items can taste so many distinct ways, handled correctly. Misuse of garlic is a crime...Please, treat your garlic with respect...Avoid at all costs that vile spew you see rotting in oil in screwtop jars. Too lazy to peel fresh? You don't deserve to eat garlic.

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Quote of the Day

Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career.

- Ryan Freitas

Quote of the Day

For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose.

- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Quote of the Day

He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

- Albert Camus, A Happy Death

Quote of the Day

There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.

.- Douglas Adams

Quote of the Day

The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly.

- Buddha

On a Walk Through Busy India, a Nature Photographer Discovers a Craving for Silence

Noise is often termed the “ignored pollutant,” one that can lead to hypertension, anxiety, heart disease, and depression.

Nature can be noisy too. The blue whale and the sperm whale are noisier than jet planes at take-off. A snapping shrimp lives up to its moniker of a pistol shrimp, producing a shock wave that measures 200 decibels underwater which, outside water, is as loud as gunfire. The greengrocer cicada stridulates at 120 decibels.

On our walk, the “noise” of the desert does not grate on my nerves the way a car roaring past on baked asphalt at 60 miles an hour can. The car is not only eight times louder than the sound of crickets in a national park, but also a zillion times more repulsive. I shudder at the sound of a revving motorbike but revel in the trumpeting of an elephant. The horn of a truck sets my teeth on edge, but I can listen to an orchestra of Pompona imperatoria, a  cicada in the old forests of Borneo, which sounds just like a truck horn, for hours.

Studies have found that natural sounds do not have the same effect on us as artificial sounds. For example, in a 2017 study that used brain scans and heart rate monitors, along with behavioral experiments, people showed a higher level of stress when exposed to artificial noise than when exposed to natural sounds. The latter helped the body relax and function better, while the former exacerbated the body’s “fight or flight” response.

On the Out of Eden Walk, we have a rich complement of both kinds of sounds. Of all the things I expected to take away from the walk, I did not expect this: a craving for silence, a keener appreciation for the nature of sound, a heightened sensitivity to metal striking metal, motors, beeps. A sentiment bordering on misophonia.

- More Here

What Does The End of the World Sound Like? Listen to This

There is, of course, a western privilege at play with the extent to which climate issues affect more vulnerable groups disproportionately — often within the Pacific and South America — than others around the globe. It is, all too often, a deficiency in our understanding of ecological crisis, too — the fact that others are already living with its real, often destructive consequences. Anja Kanngieser, a sound artist and academic, is exploring climate justice issues in the Pacific through the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research at the University of Wollongong. Speaking to me from Australia, they described a formerly colonized region, many countries within it having only gained their independence in the 1970s and 80s. The area lives with the effects of extractive industries such as mining and deep seabed exploration, alongside the nuclear testing legacies of the France, Britain and USA throughout the Marshall Islands.

Kanngieser’s sound art encompasses oral testimony, field recording and data sonification to amplify climate justice issues, weaving a narrative around the people and soundscapes of the Pacific. Their work consciously diverges from the pristine natural soundscapes feeding into conservation practices, which are founded on a western idea of nature at odds with the outlook and needs of communities in the Pacific. “There's not much discussion about how that particular idea can be really damaging for different kinds of people," they said. “There are Indigenous communities who rely on their environment for natural resources.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

Liberalism has developed an impressive arsenal of arguments and institutions to defend individual freedoms against external attacks from oppressive governments and bigoted religions, but it is unprepared for a situation when individual freedom is subverted from within, and when the very concepts of “individual” and “freedom” no longer make much sense. In order to survive and prosper in the 21st century, we need to leave behind the naive view of humans as free individuals – a view inherited from Christian theology as much as from the modern Enlightenment – and come to terms with what humans really are: hackable animals. We need to know ourselves better.

Of course, this is hardly new advice. From ancient times, sages and saints repeatedly advised people to “know thyself”. Yet in the days of Socrates, the Buddha and Confucius, you didn’t have real competition. If you neglected to know yourself, you were still a black box to the rest of humanity. In contrast, you now have competition. As you read these lines, governments and corporations are striving to hack you. If they get to know you better than you know yourself, they can then sell you anything they want – be it a product or a politician.

It is particularly important to get to know your weaknesses. They are the main tools of those who try to hack you. Computers are hacked through pre-existing faulty code lines. Humans are hacked through pre-existing fears, hatreds, biases and cravings. Hackers cannot create fear or hatred out of nothing. But when they discover what people already fear and hate it is easy to push the relevant emotional buttons and provoke even greater fury.

- Yuval Noah Harari

Wisdom Of The Week

Stop Factory Farming !

 The second big priority is factory farming. This is superneglected. There are 50 billion land animals used every year for food, and the vast majority of them are factory farmed, living in conditions of horrific suffering. They're probably among the worst-off creatures on this planet, and in many cases, we could significantly improve their lives for just pennies per animal. Yet this is hugely neglected. 

Quote of the Day

Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.

- William T. Vollmann, The Rifles

Quote of the Day

The scientific truth may be put quite briefly; eat moderately, having an ordinary mixed diet, and don’t worry.

- Robert Hutchison

What I've Been Reading

We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What’s wrong with me? This is why not giving a fuck is so key. This is why it’s going to save the world.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson

• The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s about giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
• It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives.
• In my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.
• We all get dealt cards.  Some of us get better cards than others.  And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risk we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with.  People who consistently make the best choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who eventually come out ahead in poker, just as in life.  And it’s not necessarily the people with the best cards.
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.  Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires.  The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering.  The avoidance of struggle is a struggle.  The denial of failure is a failure.  Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
• Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction.  Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems—problems which, by the way, if you’re choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating you.
• Happiness comes from solving problems.  The keyword here is ‘solving.’  If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable.  If you feel like you have problems that you can’t solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable.  The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
• The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem.  If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.  Likely people you know too.  That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt.  It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim of some circumstances.  It just means you’re not special.  Often, it’s this realization—that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain—that is the first and most important step toward solving them.
• You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
• Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
• We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
• Because here’s the thing that’s wrong with all of the “How to Be Happy” shit that’s been shared eight million times on Facebook in the past few years—here’s what nobody realizes about all of this crap: The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. 
• Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!
• My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
• The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.

Quote of the Day

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.

- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Quote of the Day

Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted. I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either. And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then, your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship. I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.

- Justice John Roberts

Quote of the Day

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

- Michel de Montaigne

What I've Been Reading

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman - its funny and brilliant. A must read.

• ...Gravity might just be the manifestation of other forces---not a force itself, but the peripheral result of something else... So if gravity were an emergent force, It would mean that gravity isn't the central power pulling things to the Earth, but the tangential consequence of something else we can't yet explain. We feel it, but it's not there. It would almost make the whole idea of "gravity" a semantic construction.
• This is how the present must be considered whenever we try to think about it as the past: It must be analyzed through the values of a future that’s unwritten. Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind. This is not easy (even with drugs). But it’s not even the hardest part. The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist.
• It is impossible to examine questions we refuse to ask.
• Back in the landlocked eighties, Dave Barry offhandedly wrote something pretty insightful about the nature of revisionism. He noted how—as a fifth-grader—he was told that the cause of the Civil War was slavery. Upon entering high school, he was told that the cause was not slavery, but economic factors. At college, he learned that it was not economic factors but acculturalized regionalism. But if Barry had gone to graduate school, the answer to what caused the Civil War would (once again) be slavery.
• I think there’s a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity—the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe. And note that I used the word “detriment.” I did not use the word “danger,” because I don’t think the notion of people living under the misguided premise that they’re right is often dangerous. Most day-to-day issues are minor, the passage of time will dictate who was right and who was wrong, and the future will sort out the past. It is, however, socially detrimental. It hijacks conversation and aborts ideas. It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds. It makes the experience of living in a society slightly worse than it should be.
• Much of the staid lionization of Citizen Kane revolves around structural techniques that had never been done before 1941. It is, somewhat famously, the first major movie where the ceilings of rooms are visible to the audience. This might seem like an insignificant detail, but—because no one prior to Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland had figured out a reasonable way to get ceilings into the frame—there’s an intangible, organic realism to Citizen Kane that advances it beyond its time period. Those visible ceilings are a meaningful modernization that twenty-first-century audiences barely notice.
• There’s growing evidence that the octopus is far more intelligent than most people ever imagined, partially because most people always assumed they were gross, delicious morons.

Quote of the Day

Imagine how convenient it would be if you could have a full history of your health? Doctor’s visits, allergies, medications, and other information would be accessible from any hospital terminal in the world. One major obstacle to such a future is the need to ensure that only the right people have access to that data. Some companies are turning to blockchain to address this security concern. European electronic health data management platform Iryo seeks to create an international network of clinics that securely share data over blockchain. Nebula Genomics is banking on blockchain to help people secure their personal genomes, which can be used to create personalized medicine and health plans.

- 7 Uses for Blockchain That Have Nothing to Do with Cryptocurrency

Wisdom Of The Week

Eventually, though, the warming sun will cause CO2 levels to fall so low that plants will start to die. First to go will be the C3 plants, so called because their photosynthesis process involves a molecule containing three carbon atoms. Most plants are of the C3 type, including wheat, rice, barley, oats, soybeans, peanuts, coconuts, bananas, potatoes, cotton, and most trees. In about 200 million years, when the CO2 concentration drops below 150 parts per million (it is at 400 today), C3 plants will disappear.

Civilization relies mostly on C3 plants, which make up about 85 percent of global agricultural production by dollar value. Another class of plants are C4 plants, which employ a form of photosynthesis that involves four carbon atoms and is more efficient under many conditions. Although C4 plants make up only about 3 percent of plant species, they account for about 25 percent of the total photosynthesis on Earth. In order to survive the die-off of C3 plants, we will probably turn to genetic engineering to expand the list of C4 plants. Today, C4 plants include corn, sorghum, millet, and sugarcane, as well as some grasses and weeds.

Efforts are already underway to convert rice from a C3 plant into a C4, which would result in about 50 percent larger harvests under present-day conditions. At 100 ppm CO2, the only rice on Earth would be C4 rice. C4 plants are thought to have evolved in response to the ongoing depletion of CO2. It is likely that as C3 plants die off, C4 species will continue to expand naturally to fill the newly opened niches in the ecosystem.

Unfortunately, about 300 million years after C3 plants disappear, C4 plants will die out too. When the CO2 concentration drops below 10 ppm, neither type of plant will remain.

Once plants disappear and cease replenishing atmospheric oxygen, animals will begin to die out. Currently, there are no known significant non-biological sources of oxygen on Earth. Once the plants are gone, oxygen will be a non-renewable resource. Large animals would probably asphyxiate within a few million years. Smaller and hardier creatures might last longer. Some types of microbes will probably survive by using metabolic reactions that do not rely on carbon dioxide or oxygen, but instead use materials such as sulfates or iron.

So that’s the number: In a paltry 500 million years or so, no humans will remain on the surface of the Earth—at least, not outside of some hypothetical controlled environment. And things get worse from there. After the atmospheric CO2 is gone and no longer able to regulate Earth’s surface temperature, things will start to get very hot. In about a billion years, the average surface temperature will increase to above 45 degrees Celsius from the current 17 degrees Celsius. Important biochemical processes turn off at temperatures above 45 degrees Celsius, leaving most of the planetary surface uninhabitable. Animal life will need to migrate to the cooler poles to survive; but by 1.5 billion years from now, even the poles will be too hot. Not even cockroaches will survive.

- How to Survive Doomsday

What I've Been Reading

The Complete Guide to Fasting: Heal Your Body Through Intermittent, Alternate-Day, and Extended Fasting by Jimmy Moore and Dr. Jason Fung.

This is the ancient secret. This is the cycle of life. Fasting follows feasting. Feasting follows fasting. Diets must be intermittent, not steady. Food is a celebration of life. Every single culture in the world celebrates with large feasts. That’s normal, and it’s good. However, religion has always reminded us that we must balance our feasting with periods of fasting—“atonement,” “repentance” or “cleansing.” These ideas are ancient and time-tested. Should you eat lots of food on your birthday? Absolutely. Should you eat lots of food at a wedding? Absolutely. These are times to celebrate and indulge. But there is also a time to fast. We cannot change this cycle of life. We cannot feast all the time. We cannot fast all the time. It won’t work. It doesn’t work.

Quote of the Day

In a time when computers were replacing many human functions, it will eventually come to be that audaciousness, vision, courage, creativity, a sense of justice--these will be the only tasks left to us. A computer can't practice secrecy or misdirection, a computer can't feel an urge to remake the world.

Only humans can be that crazy.

What you will do with this lesson, what ends you will put it to, are up to you. All I can say is that it is in these times of flux and upheaval that we may need that ambition most.

- Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday.

Quote of the Day

Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms -- you’ll be able to use them better when you’re older.

- Seneca

What I’ve Been Reading

It is just one word: Conspiracies. What follows is Machiavelli’s guide for rising up against a powerful enemy, for ending the reign of a supposed tyrant, for protecting yourself against those who wish to do you harm. It is appropriate that such a book sits just within arm’s reach of one of Thiel’s wingback armchairs and not far from the chess set which occupies considerable amounts of his time. Something in these pages planted itself deep into Thiel’s mind when he first read it long ago, and something in Thiel allowed him to see past Machiavelli’s deceptive warnings against conspiracies and hear the wily strategist’s true message: that some situations present only one option. It’s the option available to many but pursued by few: intrigue. To strategize, coordinate, and sustain a concerted effort to remove someone from power, to secretly move against an enemy, to do what Machiavelli would say was one of the hardest things to do in the world: to overthrow an existing order and do something new. To engage in a conspiracy to change the world.

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday.

For starters this book is much better any John Grisham legal thrillers; secondly, this book is about “Poetic Justice”. I am with Peter Thiel on this one and sometimes we have take different “means” as long as the end is “good” (and we should be aware of its unintended consequences). One can judge Thiel in any way they want but history has taught us that this has been the ONLY way progress has happened in the world, period.

It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it. This choice defines us. Puts us at a crossroads with ourselves and what we think about the kind of person we are. “Anyone who is threatened and is forced by necessity either to act or to suffer,” writes Machiavelli, “becomes a very dangerous man to the prince.” And Peter Thiel was driven into a desperate position, of and not of his own making, that had started with a matter of his identity and become about a deeper identity. Now he had not only decided to act against Gawker, but he would conspire to destroy them.

[---]

 The line from the Obamas was “When they go low, we go high.” It’s a dignified and impressive mantra, if only because for the most part, whether you liked them or not, it’s hard to deny that they followed it. But the now cliché remark should not be taken conclusively, for it makes one dangerous omission. It forgets that from time to time in life, we might have to take someone out behind the woodshed. How we have lost this. How squeamish we have become. We now blindly demonize what is often one of the most effective forms of action. How vulnerable this ignorance has made us to the few real conspiracies, successful or not, that exist in the world. In this rare occasion, though, we got a glimpse, a peek behind the curtain, as the title of Gawker’s last post put it, of how things work. Now we know. Peter showed us. And yet our instinct is to turn away, to put our fingers in our ears. It’s why not once in nearly a decade of concentrated effort and scheming directed at a single enemy—at an entity who was obsessively covered and followed by the media—by an opponent who publicly stated his undying hatred of that enemy, did a single spectator, victim, or even many of the participants suspect any of what you read in the pages of this book. There is no question that what Thiel did over those years was brilliant, cunning, and ruthless. It is equally true that Gawker mostly beat itself. Denton and company allowed this to happen. Even the most cynical and aggressive media site on the planet had missed what was happening right in front of them; they did nothing to save themselves. “The idea of a conspiracy,” Thiel would say to me, “is linked with intentionality, with planning, working towards longer-term goals. In a world where you don’t have conspiracies maybe also those things disappear.

[---]

Once one forges oneself into a hammer of justice and feels the power of crushing one’s enemies, driving them before one and taking their possessions as one’s own, does one become addicted to it? It can become a cycle without end. It can change you, ruin you. One of the worst things that can ever happen to a leader is to unconsciously associate resistance and criticism with opportunity. When everyone tells you you’re wrong and you turn out to be right, you learn a dangerous lesson: Never listen to warnings. And so the reason that few conspiracies are followed by additional successful conspiracies is because of this process and the changes that power produces. 

       [---]

Peter thought he’d be greeted as a liberator, that Gawker was a scourge that once eliminated would allow for open, collaborative discussion. If anything, the opposite has happened. The candidate he helped put in office embodies many of the bullying traits that Thiel claimed to abhor. Trump would also come to actively stymie expression, threatening to “open up” the libel laws in this country and pressuring NFL owners to fire the players who kneeled during the national anthem. This must hit Thiel sometimes, perhaps in the quiet cabin of his Gulfstream, that the man in the White House is essentially the opposite of everything he had spent his life believing in, that Trump threatened the very libertarian freedoms and open civil discourse that Thiel had spent his money protecting. To know he is associated with that, in certain ways responsible for it, might be the most unintended consequence of all.

Quote of the Day

He knew now that when power and ambition and curiosity were satisfied, there still were left the longings of the heart.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars

What I’ve Been Reading

I’m here to call bullshit on compromise right now. We don’t compromise because it’s right; we compromise because it is easy and because it saves face. We compromise in order to say that at least we got half the pie. Distilled to its essence, we compromise to be safe. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals. 

So don’t settle and - here’s a simple rule - never split the difference. Creative solutions are almost always preceded by some degree of risk, annoyance, confusion and conflict. Accommodation and compromise produce none of that. You’ve to embrace the hard stuff. That’s where great deals are. And that’s what great negotiators do. 

[---] 

And I am going to leave you with one request: Whether it’s in the office or around the family dinner table, don’t avoid honest, clear conflict. It will get you the best car price, the higher salary, and the largest donation. It will also save your marriage, your friendship, and your family. 

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your Life Depended on it by Chris Voss. This is one the most wise books I have read this year. Pragmatic and should be used as a handbook for everyday life.
Thank you Chris for writing this book.

• The whole concept, which you’ll learn as the centerpiece of this book, is called Tactical Empathy. This is listening as a martial art, balancing the subtle behaviors of emotional intelligence and the assertive skills of influence, to gain access to the mind of another person. Contrary to popular opinion, listening is not a passive activity. It is the most active thing you can do.
• The first step to achieving a mastery of daily negotiation is to get over your aversion to negotiating. You don’t need to like it; you just need to understand that’s how the world works. Negotiating does not mean browbeating or grinding someone down. It simply means playing the emotional game that human society is set up for. In this world, you get what you ask for; you just have to ask correctly. So claim your prerogative to ask for what you think is right.
• Most people approach a negotiation so preoccupied by the arguments that support their position that they are unable to listen attentively. In one of the most cited research papers in psychology,1 George A. Miller persuasively put forth the idea that we can process only about seven pieces of information in our conscious mind at any given moment. In other words, we are easily overwhelmed.
• Going too fast is one of the mistakes all negotiators are prone to making. If we’re too much in a hurry, people can feel as if they’re not being heard and we risk undermining the rapport and trust we’ve built. There’s plenty of research that now validates the passage of time as one of the most important tools for a negotiator. When you slow the process down, you also calm it down. After all, if someone is talking, they’re not shooting.
• Mirroring, also called isopraxism, is essentially imitation. It’s another neurobehavior humans (and other animals) display in which we copy each other to comfort each other. It can be done with speech patterns, body language, vocabulary, tempo, and tone of voice. It’s generally an unconscious behavior—we are rarely aware of it when it’s happening—but it’s a sign that people are bonding, in sync, and establishing the kind of rapport that leads to trust.
• By repeating back what people say, you trigger this mirroring instinct and your counterpart will inevitably elaborate on what was just said and sustain the process of connecting. Psychologist Richard Wiseman created a study using waiters to identify what was the more effective method of creating a connection with strangers: mirroring or positive reinforcement.
• Label your counterpart’s fears to diffuse their power. We all want to talk about the happy stuff, but remember, the faster you interrupt action in your counterpart’s amygdala, the part of the brain that generates fear, the faster you can generate feelings of safety, well-being, and trust.
•  List the worst things that the other party could say about you and say them before the other person can. Performing an accusation audit in advance prepares you to head off negative dynamics before they take root. And because these accusations often sound exaggerated when said aloud, speaking them will encourage the other person to claim that quite the opposite is true.
• It comes down to the deep and universal human need for autonomy. People need to feel in control. When you preserve a person’s autonomy by clearly giving them permission to say “No” to your ideas, the emotions calm, the effectiveness of the decisions go up, and the other party can really look at your proposal. They’re allowed to hold it in their hands, to turn it around. And it gives you time to elaborate or pivot in order to convince your counterpart that the change you’re proposing is more advantageous than the status quo.
• “No”—or the lack thereof—also serves as a warning, the canary in the coal mine. If despite all your efforts, the other party won’t say “No,” you’re dealing with people who are indecisive or confused or who have a hidden agenda. In cases like that you have to end the negotiation and walk away.
• Think of it like this: No “No” means no go.
• Sometimes the only way to get your counterpart to listen and engage with you is by forcing them into a “No.” That means intentionally mislabeling one of their emotions or desires or asking a ridiculous question—like, “It seems like you want this project to fail”—that can only be answered negatively.
• Over the next few pages I’ll explain a few prospect theory tactics you can use to your advantage. But first let me leave you with a crucial lesson about loss aversion: In a tough negotiation, it’s not enough to show the other party that you can deliver the thing they want.To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that they have something concrete to lose if the deal falls through.
• WHEN YOU DO TALK NUMBERS, USE ODD ONES: Every number has a psychological significance that goes beyond its value. And I’m not just talking about how you love 17 because you think it’s lucky. What I mean is that, in terms of negotiation, some numbers appear more immovable than others.The biggest thing to remember is that numbers that end in 0 inevitably feel like temporary placeholders, guesstimates that you can easily be negotiated off of. But anything you throw out that sounds less rounded—say, $37,263—feels like a figure that you came to as a result of thoughtful calculation. Such numbers feel serious and permanent to your counterpart, so use them to fortify your offers.
• Giving your counterpart the illusion of control by asking calibrated questions—by asking for help—is one of the most powerful tools for suspending unbelief.
• How am I supposed to do that?” The critical part of this approach is that you really are asking for help and your delivery must convey that. With this negotiating scheme, instead of bullying the clerk, you’re asking for their advice and giving them the illusion of control.
• Avoid questions that can be answered with “Yes” or tiny pieces of information. These require little thought and inspire the human need for reciprocity; you will be expected to give something back.”
• Ask calibrated questions that start with the words “How” or “What.” By implicitly asking the other party for help, these questions will give your counterpart an illusion of control and will inspire them to speak at length, revealing important information.
• Don’t ask questions that start with “Why” unless you want your counterpart to defend a goal that serves you. “Why” is always an accusation, in any language.
• Bite your tongue. When you’re attacked in a negotiation, pause and avoid angry emotional reactions. Instead, ask your counterpart a calibrated question.
• There are two key questions you can ask to push your counterparts to think they are defining success their way: “How will we know we’re on track?” and “How will we address things if we find we’re off track?” When they answer, you summarize their answers until you get a “That’s right.” Then you’ll know they’ve bought in.
• One great tool for avoiding this trap is the Rule of Three.
• The Rule of Three is simply getting the other guy to agree to the same thing three times in the same conversation. It’s tripling the strength of whatever dynamic you’re trying to drill into at the moment. In doing so, it uncovers problems before they happen. It’s really hard to repeatedly lie or fake conviction.
• As a well-prepared negotiator who seeks information and gathers it relentlessly, you’re actually going to want the other guy to name a price first, because you want to see his hand. You’re going to welcome the extreme anchor. But extreme anchoring is powerful and you’re human: your emotions may well up. If they do there are ways to weather the storm without bidding against yourself or responding with anger. Once you learn these tactics, you’ll be prepared to withstand the hit and counter with panache.
• This is a crucial concept in negotiation. In every negotiating session, there are different kinds of information. There are those things we know, like our counterpart’s name and their offer and our experiences from other negotiations. Those are known knowns. There are those things we are certain that exist but we don’t know, like the possibility that the other side might get sick and leave us with another counterpart. Those are known unknowns and they are like poker wild cards; you know they’re out there but you don’t know who has them. But most important are those things we don’t know that we don’t know, pieces of information we’ve never imagined but that would be game changing if uncovered. Maybe our counterpart wants the deal to fail because he’s leaving for a competitor. These unknown unknowns are Black Swans.
• So what kind of Black Swans do you look to be aware of as negative leverage? Effective negotiators look for pieces of information, often obliquely revealed, that show what is important to their counterpart: Who is their audience? What signifies status and reputation to them? What most worries them?Access to this hidden space very often comes through understanding the other side’s worldview, their reason for being, their religion. Indeed, digging into your counterpart’s “religion” (sometimes involving God but not always) inherently implies moving beyond the negotiating table and into the life, emotional and otherwise, of your counterpart. Once you’ve understood your counterpart’s worldview, you can build influence. That’s why as we talked with Watson I spent my energy trying to unearth who he was rather than logically arguing him into surrender.
• Remember Albert Mehrabian’s 7-38-55 Rule of Personal Communication: 7% spoken words, 38% voice & tone and 55% body language.

Quote of the Day

We are now living in an age of information explosion … the last thing people need is more information. What they really need is somebody to arrange all of the bits of information into a meaningful picture – and this is what I try to do.

- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari

Quote of the Day

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

What I’ve Been Reading

You cannot have your news instantly and have it done well. You cannot have your news reduced to 140 characters or less without losing large parts of it. You cannot manipulate the news but not expect it to be manipulated against you. You cannot have your news for free; you can only obscure the costs. If as a culture we can learn this lesson, and if we can learn to love the hard work, we will save ourselves much trouble and collateral damage. We must remember: There is no easy way

Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday.

Remember, this book was written years before the Presidential elections. The onus is on us on being so stupid not having read this book and understand the implications of new tools the old culture now thrives on.

When intelligent people read, they ask themselves a simple question: What do I plan to do with this information? Most readers have abandoned even pretending to consider this. I imagine it’s because they’re afraid of the answer: There isn’t a thing we can do with it. There is no practical purpose in our lives for most of what blogs produce other than distraction.

Quote of the Day

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naive. But it isn’t.

- Atul Gawande

Roosevelt and Fala

All this is a puzzle. Dogs don’t beg for money. They rarely get fired. They barely sweat.

They certainly don’t choke. Thousands worked as sentries in World War II. Right now, about 1,600 military working dogs are in the field or assisting recuperating veterans. Some are trained to detect explosives, and put their lives on the line to protect soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. One bomb detector was with the Navy SEAL team that raided Osama bin Laden’s compound.

It’s instructive to compare Trump’s frequent use of the D-word with a famous passage in a speech by one of his predecessors, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The speech was nominally about dogs – or, a particular dog – but it was actually about decency and civility.

The date was Sept. 23, 1944, and it was the height of an ugly campaign season. Roosevelt, who was seeking his fourth term, began by noting that “Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons.” They have gone much further and “now include my little dog, Fala.”

Roosevelt was telling the truth. Republicans had charged that the president had left Fala behind on a trip to the Aleutian Islands, and then had to send a Navy destroyer back to get him, costing American taxpayers millions of dollars.

With mock outrage, Roosevelt said, “I don't resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them.”

Roosevelt added quietly and with resignation, “I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself.” But – his killer line – “I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

The speech worked in part because Fala was known and beloved throughout the nation. He traveled frequently with the president. Movies were made about him.

During the Battle of the Bulge – a major battle with Germany toward the end of World War II – American soldiers tested the identity of suspected German infiltrators by asking them to name the president’s dog.

As the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin put it, the laughter produced by the Fala speech “reverberated in living rooms and kitchens throughout the country, where people were listening to the speech on their radios. The Fala bit was so funny, one reporter observed, that ‘even the stoniest of Republican faces cracked a smile.’”


But it wasn’t just funny. Roosevelt’s remarks about Fala were in the context of a speech that touched directly on the Great Depression, the fight against fascism and the right to vote. Defending his beloved dog, Roosevelt was showing his own gentleness, and making a point about the cruelty and absurdity of personal attacks in politics. He was saying that we should be kind to one another – and focus on what matters.

Like a dog.- A Dog Has to Resent All These Attacks

Quote of the Day

Honest people are a refuge: You know they mean what they say; you know they will not say one thing to your face and another behind your back; you know they will tell you when they think you have failed—and for this reason their praise cannot be mistaken for mere flattery.

- Sam Harris, Lying

Wisdom Of The Week

As the examples of AirBnb, Facebook and YouTube indicate, it’s possible for private firms to create platforms that serve the same purposes as a commons but these platforms are not a commons since they are privately owned. Private ownership is great but not without tradeoffs. Bill Gates hinted at one problem when he defined a platform:

A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it.

The platform dilemma is that a company that controls a platform wants to maximize the company’s value rather than the economic value of everybody that uses it. Company value and social value are correlated but they are not the same. There are three problems. First, the company will want to grab up as large a share of the social value as possible. That’s ok for efficiency but not ideal for platform users who, because of network effects and coordination issues, may find that they need to use the platform even though it leaves them with only a small surplus. Second, the company may take actions that increase its value but reduce social value. On some margins, for example, Facebook and YouTube profit from advertising that reduces social value. The third problem is that in creating a platform where many people meet and transact, a small number of companies come to control and access more data than may be ideal. Big centralized data is worrying for libertarian reasons but also because big, centralized data is a honeypot for bad actors and hence insecure.

The first set of internet commons like TCP/IP and HTTP were created by government and independent researchers. The unique use-case of blockchains is that blockchains can be used to incentivize the creation of unowned platforms, i.e. commons. The creator of a blockchain need not control the blockchain and indeed can credibly commit not to control it. Thus, the creator of a blockchain can commit to never taking actions to maximize profit at the expense of social value and it can commit to never taking actions to redistribute more of the social value to itself. The blockchain creator, however, can be rewarded through token issuance. Moreover, since the value of the token and the social value of the blockchain are positively correlated the blockchain creator has strong incentives to create a commons that maximizes social value.

To give an example, LBRY–one of the blockchain firms that I advise–is a kind of YouTube on the blockchain. The protocol that LBRY has created is unowned. LBRY’s incentives are to create something that will maximize the value of both content creators and content consumers. The social value created could well exceed that of any owned platform and if LBRY earns a small share of this social value they will be well compensated. Token issuance and appreciation is what incentivizes the creation of the commons.

Creating a commons on the blockchain isn’t easy, however. Decentralized institutions are much more difficult to design than centralized institutions. Decentralized databases are a big advance but making them work at scale-size and speed is a challenge. Precisely because the blockchain is unowned the designers have to get much more correct, right out of the gate. Changing a commons on the fly, forking, is costly, disruptive and not always possible. All of this explains why in the history of the world almost all decentralized institutions, such as markets and language, were not designed but arose through evolutionary forces. Hayek called decentralized institutions spontaneous orders because he implicitly assumed that all such decentralized institutions were spontaneous, i.e. unplanned. Only in very recent years have economists and computer scientists developed the understanding and tools that are necessary to design decentralized orders–orders that are planned but not controlled. Today smart contracts on blockchains like Ethereum have the potential to create a sophisticated set of global common resources that will form the foundation for much of the economic and social structure of this century–this is the opportunity of the blockchain commons.

- Alex Tabarrok

Quote of the Day

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince