Category: ideas

“I’d bet my entire future income that more people read and discussed Kant last year than in 1950, or that the size of the class of people who study and produce ideas for a living is now much larger than it was in 1950.”

“Knowledge is not a lean-back process; it’s a lean-forward activity. Just because public domain content is online and indexed doesn’t mean that those outside the small self-selected group of scholars already interested in it will ever discover it and engage in it.”

Studies of ants inform everything from traffic planning to baggage control at Sky Harbor Airport. But all of the previous studies might be wrong.

Communities, just like species, can evolve, says evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, but it takes a lot of awareness and work.

“Virtually anything you can imagine, you can create – from earrings or shoes to an aeroplane or even a house. And instead of a factory-based production line, it’s all about the one-off, tweaked to exact specifications.”

“Beauty is naturally rewarded in jobs where physical attractiveness would seem to matter, such as prostitution, entertainment, customer service and so on. But it also yields rewards in unexpected fields.”

“A first answer could be ‘the set of things within the volume of space we can measure.’ What things? Galaxies, stars, planets, galaxy clusters, black holes, that is, objects that we can probe with our instruments … The difficulty is that the universe is not a ‘thing’ in the sense that a star or a galaxy is a thing.”

“Subtract the ‘hocus-pocus’ about reincarnation, karma, and ‘bodhisattvas flying on lotus leaves,’ and you’ll find a rigorous, clear-eyed account of the universe and our place in it – an account, in fact, designed to satisfy even the most ardent modern-day materialist. Buddhism matters, in other words, because it’s actually right.”

“Harvard researchers … found that processing food through cooking freed up [for early humans] literally hours each day not spent ‘feeding,’ which includes ingesting, chewing, and swallowing food. That newfound time could be spent on other pursuits, such as hunting to procure higher-quality foods, creating tools, and socializing.”

“As the famous example says, Eskimo [sic] have numerous words to describe what Americans would just call ‘snow’ and ‘ice.’ This suggests language systems don’t merely translate universal ideas into different spellings; they encode different concepts. And when we lose a language, we risk losing those concepts.”