Overestimating the potential upside of every new sign of tech progress is as common as downplaying the downsides. It's easy to let our imaginations run wild with how any new development is going to change everything practically overnight. The unforeseen technical roadblocks that inevitably spring up are only one reason for this consistent miscalculation. Human nature is simply out of sync with the nature of technological development. We see progress as linear, a straight line of improvement. In reality, this is only true with mature technologies that have already been developed and deployed. [...]
      Before the predictable progress phase, there are two previous phases: struggle and then breakthrough. This fits the axiom of Bill Gates, "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." We expect linear progress, but what we get are years of setbacks and maturation. Then the right technologies combine or a critical mass is reached and boom, it takes off vertically for a while, surprising us again, until it reaches the mature phase and levels off. Our minds see tech progress as a straight diagonal line, but it's usually more of an S-shape.

Deep Thinking / Garry Kasparov

The willingness to keep trying new things - different methods, uncomfortable tasks - when you are already an expert at something is what separates good from great. Focusing on your strengths is required for peak performance, but improving your weaknesses has the potential for the greatest gains. This is true for athletes, executives, and entire companies. Leaving your comfort zone involves risk, however, and when you are already doing well the temptation to stick with the status quo can be overwhelming, leading to stagnation.

Deep Thinking / Garry Kasparov

"I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

Michael Jordan

      The gains in life expectancy we've witnessed over the past 120 years, and those to come, could be wiped out for a generation unless we address the greatest threat to our lives: other life-forms that seek to prey on us. It doesn't matter if we live for decades upon decades longer if a pandemic quickly snuffs out hundreds of millions of lives - negating and even rolling back the gains in average lifespan we will have achieved. Global warming is a long-term, critical issue to deal with, but one could also argue that, at least within our lifetimes, infections are our greatest threat.

Lifespan / David Sinclair / 2019

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

This Be The Verse / Philip Larkin

"What day is it?" asked the Pooh.
"It's today," squeeked Piglet.
"My favourite day," said Pooh.

At Facebook, figuring it out is a way of life. The company got its start with a bunch of Harvard undergraduates who knew how to code but had almost no experience with anything else. They figured it out. Each new wave of employees followed the same path. Some took too long and were pushed out. The rest got comfortable with the notion that experience was not helpful. At Facebook, the winners were people who could solve any problem they encountered. The downside of this model is that it encourages employees to circumvent anything inconvenient or hard to fix.

Zucked / Roger McNamee

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all of its moments - which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self - which is absorbed in the moment - your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss? Because a football game is a story. And in stories, endings matter.

Being Mortal / Atul Gawande

      Elementary introductions to computers explain them as TOM, the Totally Obedient Moron - an inspired acronym that captures the essence of all computer programs to date: They have no idea what they are doing or why. So it won't help to give AIs more and more predetermined functionalities in the hope that these will eventually constitute Generality - the elusive G in AGI. We are aiming for the opposite, a DATA: a Disobedient Autonomous Thinking Application.

Possible Minds / John Brockman | David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment

Any system simple enough to be understandable will not be compli- cated enough to behave intelligently, while any system complicated enough to behave intelligently will be too complicated to understand.

Possible Minds / John Brockman | George Dyson: The Third Law

DNA replication is imperfect, and we have plenty of spellcheckers in our cells. But mutations arise, mostly single changes, occasionally chunkier sections of DNA. Withouit them, no evolution would occur, for there would be no variation on which selection could act. From an evolutionary point of view, perfection is boring and impractical, and infidelity is essential, at least when it comes to the code. The process of DNA replication has to be imperfect. You have acquired through nothing other than chance at least 100 mutations that are unique to you. If you have children, you may well pass them on to your children, and they will acquire plenty of their own. As long as humans keep having sex and that sex results in more humans, then we are evolving. We can avoid these evolutionary changes no more easily than we can change the weather.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived / Adam Rutherford

Are you really just a pile of genes?

Technically, yes. But embedded within your genome, there are many potential versions of you. The person you see in the mirror is just one of them, fished out by the unique things you've been exposed to since conception. The new science of epigenetics is the study of how chemical changes made to DNA, or proteins that interact with DNA, can affect gene activity. DNA can be modified by environmental factors in ways that can profoundly affect development and behavior. Recently, it's also been shown that the microbes in your body - aka your microbiome - can be a significant environmental factor that affects myriad behaviors, from overeating to depression. In sum, we are our genes - but our genes cannot be evaluated outside the context of our environment. Genes are the piano keys, but the environment plays the song.

Bill Sullivan / National Geographic 09.2019

The terror of sickness and old age is not merely the terror of the losses one is forced to endure but also the terror of the isolation. As people become aware of the finitude of their life, they do not ask for much. They do not seek more riches. They do not seek more power. They ask only to be permitted, insofar as possible, to keep shaping the story of their life in the world - to make choices and sustain connections to others according to their own priorities.

Being Mortal / Atul Gawande

      If we shift as we age toward appreciating everyday pleasures and relationships rather than toward achieving, having, and getting, and if we find this more fulfilling, then why do we take so long to do it? Why do we wait until we're old? The common view was that these lessons are hard to learn. Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.
      [...]What if the change in needs and desires has nothing to do with age per se? Suppose it merely has to do with perspective - your personal sense of how finite your time in this world is.

Being Mortal / Atul Gawande

Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data. I've been telling companies and governments for years that data is probably your most valuable asset. Individuals should be able to monetise their data - that's their own human value - not to be exploited

Brittany Kaiser / The Guardian

Chaos is a ladder. Many who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse. They cling to the realm or the Gods or love. Illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.

Game of Thrones S3E6 / Littlefinger

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

Fisrt Law of Technology / Melvin Kranzberg

Three Useless Phrases

Visitors to Iceland in the 1990s reported that the official tourist guide handed out at Reykjavik airport had, like all other such guides, a 'useful phrases' section. Unlike them, I was told, the Icelandic guide also had a 'useless phrases' section. Apparently it contained three phrases, which were, in English: 'Where is the railway station?', 'It's a nice day today', and 'Is there anything cheaper?'

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism / Ha-Joon Chang

Utopia is on the horizon. I move two steps closer;
it moves two steps further away. I walk another ten
steps and the horizon runs ten steps further away.
As much as I may walk, I'll never reach it. So
what's the point of utopia? The point is this: to
keep walking.

Eduardo Galeano / Rutger Bregman 'Utopia for Realists'

      How does a zipper work? Rate your understanding on a scale from 0 (no clue) to 10 (easy-peasy). Write the number down. Now sketch out on a piece of paper how a zipper actually works. Add a brief description, as though you were trying to explain it very precisely to someone who'd never seen a zipper before. Give yourself a couple of minutes. Finished? Now reassess your understanding of zippers on the same scale.

     Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil, researchers at Yale University, confronted hundreds of people with equally simple questions. How does a toilet work? How does a battery work? The results were always the same: we think we understand these things reasonably well until we're forced to explain them. Only then do we appreciate how many gaps there are in our knowledge. You're probably similar. You were convinced you understood more than you actually did. That's the knowledge illusion.
[...]
     In sum: think independently, don't be too faithful to the party line, and above all give dogmas a wide berth. The quicker you understand that you don't understand the world, the better you'll understand the world

The Art of the Good Life / Rolf Dobelli