We are increasingly comfortable with abstractions.
I remember vividly when this music video came out in 1983, with its novel close-cuts and an androgynous Annie Lennox, everyone thought it was the coolest thing in the world:
Now, it seems quaint.
And you can pretty much do anything you want, your only boundaries are your own imagination and creativity.
For example:
And virtual art is making a splash, not just NFTs:
Most futuristic books and films are dystopian or create a sense of fear about the future:
My thesis is that society will continue to innovate and we're just at the beginning of amazing discoveries and breakthroughs.
Will there be problems?
Of course. They will always be with us, but the strides I expect in almost every aspect of innovation, creativity and
commerce, as well as in exploration, both internal and external, make me very bullish on human ingenuity.
Paraphrasing Josh Wolfe:
My thesis is the directional arrow of human progress is up. And, yes, that's the way I'm betting as well.
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1/ .@polina_marinova, sometimes cool synchronicities happen. Just as you posted this bit about my wife and my simple rule of "try to raise great adults" precluding saying things like "because I said so" to your kids, I read this
2/ passage from @DavidDeutschOxf's outstanding book "The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World" which does offers an excellent explanation for *why* saying that to your kids is such a bad idea.
3/ "Bad philosophy has always existed too. For instance, children have always been told, ‘Because I say so.’ Although that is not always intended as a philosophical position, it is worth analysing it as one, for in four simple words it contains remarkably many themes of false
1/Just recorded a podcast with the amazing and inspiring @MSFalk, who despite having to deal with ALS, continues in his efforts to leave the world a little better than he found it.
His rational optimism and detailed understanding of many of the big problems we face as a society
2/ is not told with a pessimistic attitude but rather with pragmatic, actionable suggestions that he writes about in his two books.
I plan on having him on again after I read both books, in order to have a discussion about how we don't have to move mountains to make things
3/ much better for everyone in society. Michael's a very special person, I urge you to give him a follow and read his books. The first on is free for kindle on Amazon, which you can find here:
1/ "The same thing happened today that happened yesterday, only to different people."
~Walter Winchell
2/ I have long contended that in the battle for investment success, investors are their own worst enemy. my first investment research in 1989 in a paper entitled "Quantitative Models as an Aid in Offsetting Systematic Errors in Decision-Making." (I've gotten better with titles.)
3/ I tried to demonstrate that human beings ultimately determine how stocks are priced. Since we don’t check human nature at the door when entering a stock exchange, I argued that we could learn a great deal from psychological studies
1/Reading more about this and was reminded of Elmyr de Hory, considered the greatest art forger of the 20th century. He was unique in that he could copy seemingly *any* painter or style.
2/ "[He] was the greatest art forger of the 20th century. He was versatile. Previous art forgers have specialized in one or two artists, but Elmyr was doing van Goghs and Cezannes and Modiglianis and Rembrandts and damn near everybody. It is
3/ believed by many that there are Elmyrs hanging in every major museum in the world still. Which makes sense, because the experts who authenticated them would look less like experts if they announced, “We’ve changed our mind and we now think they’re forgeries.”
"A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity."
~@AdamMGrant
2/ I often say that becoming prematurely certain of *anything* can lead you to the wrong conclusions. In this book, @AdamMGrant offers many strategies for how to continually rethink things to keep them in the 'thinking' and not the 'proving' category where many of us spend
3/ far too much time.
"Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
~George Bernard Shaw
Grant reminds us that we too quickly revert to opinions that *feel* right--often simply because of how long we've held them.
Whenever I find myself coming back to my notes again and again on a recent read, I think that means I should tell people they might want to check it out. Here's the book:
👉🏻 Most psychological studies many of us are familiar with and cite comes from "Massively biased samples: Most of what was known experimentally about human psychology and behavior was based on studies with undergraduates from Western societies"
3/ This is underlined by the fact that works out to a 96% concentration on 12% of the world’s population!
It highlights that "When cross-cultural data were
available from multiple populations, Western samples typically anchored the extreme end of the distribution.