A THREAD on key ideas from the book "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond:
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History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.
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All human societies contain inventive people.
It’s just that some environments provide more starting materials, and more favorable conditions for utilizing inventions, than do other environments.
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My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to meet a foreseen need.
A THREAD on thought provoking ideas by Bill Watterson:
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They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around.
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I go to school, but I never learn what I want to know.
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It's not denial. I'm just selective about the reality I accept.
A THREAD on thought provoking ideas by Michio Kaku:
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To understand the difficulty of predicting the next 100 years, we have to appreciate the difficulty that the people of 1900 had in predicting the world of 2000.
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There is so much noise on the Internet, with would-be prophets daily haranguing their audience and megalomaniacs trying to push bizarre ideas, that eventually people will cherish a new commodity: wisdom.
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To understand the precise point when the possible becomes the impossible, you have to appreciate and understand the laws of physics.
A THREAD on thought provoking ideas shared in the book "The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age" by James Dale Davidson:
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The cybereconomy, rather than China, could well be the greatest economic phenomenon of the next thirty years.
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Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation-state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.
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Market forces, not political majorities, will compel societies to reconfigure themselves in ways that public opinion will neither comprehend nor welcome.