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ryandandrews 's review for:
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
I enjoy this author!
Here are a few of my favorite clips:
For thousands of years homo-sapiens behaved as an ecological serial killer, now it is morphing into an ecological mass murderer.
Do not make the wrongful use of the name of God. What does this mean? Perhaps it means that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds. People hate somebody and say 'God hates him'. People covet a piece of land and say 'God wants it'. The world would be a much better place if we followed the third commandment more devotedly. Leave God out of it and find yourself some other excuse.
Religious faith is not a necessary condition for moral behavior. Morality of some kind is natural. Morality means reducing suffering. Therefore you don't need to believe in a story, you just need to develop a deep appreciation for suffering.
People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
We think we know far more today, but as individuals we know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. We have 'the knowledge illusion' (Ryan's note: especially around food).
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Most of our views are shaped by communal group think rather than individual rationality. And we hold onto these views due to group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don't like too many facts, and they certainly don't like to feel stupid.
The system is structured so that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance. And those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth.
In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
When a thousand people believe some made up for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion.
Fiction is among the most effective tools in the human toolkit.
It's the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information.
2 rules of thumb for making sure your information is reliable: 1) If you want reliable information, pay good money for it. 2) If some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature (peer reviewed articles, expert articles, etc).
Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war.
People don't need MORE information. They need the ability to make sense of information. To tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant. And how to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.
Here are a few of my favorite clips:
For thousands of years homo-sapiens behaved as an ecological serial killer, now it is morphing into an ecological mass murderer.
Do not make the wrongful use of the name of God. What does this mean? Perhaps it means that we should never use the name of God to justify our political interests, our economic ambitions, or our personal hatreds. People hate somebody and say 'God hates him'. People covet a piece of land and say 'God wants it'. The world would be a much better place if we followed the third commandment more devotedly. Leave God out of it and find yourself some other excuse.
Religious faith is not a necessary condition for moral behavior. Morality of some kind is natural. Morality means reducing suffering. Therefore you don't need to believe in a story, you just need to develop a deep appreciation for suffering.
People afraid of losing their truth tend to be more violent than people who are used to looking at the world from several different viewpoints. Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
We think we know far more today, but as individuals we know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs. We have 'the knowledge illusion' (Ryan's note: especially around food).
Providing people with more and better information is unlikely to improve matters. Most of our views are shaped by communal group think rather than individual rationality. And we hold onto these views due to group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don't like too many facts, and they certainly don't like to feel stupid.
The system is structured so that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance. And those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth.
In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.
When a thousand people believe some made up for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion.
Fiction is among the most effective tools in the human toolkit.
It's the responsibility of all of us to invest time and effort in uncovering our biases and in verifying our sources of information.
2 rules of thumb for making sure your information is reliable: 1) If you want reliable information, pay good money for it. 2) If some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature (peer reviewed articles, expert articles, etc).
Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war.
People don't need MORE information. They need the ability to make sense of information. To tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant. And how to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.