In 1661, Louis XIV was 23 and eager to show his power.

He commissioned the grand Palace of Versailles with an astonishing 2400 fountains.

Bringing water was a huge challenge.

Engineers tried everything until they stumbled upon a bizarre solution.

Get ready for a wild ride! Louis XIV enjoyed impressing foreign ambassadors with the abundance of water, which was a luxury back then.

However, hydraulics hadn’t improved since Roman times.

Have you ever wondered why we tend to help others when we're feeling down? Is it just a coincidence or is there something deeper at play? Researchers stumbled upon a strange discovery while experimenting with a mysterious "mood-freezing" drug called Mnemoxine.

What's stopping you from having good ideas?

🧵 Having good ideas does not require genius.

Most people fail at it because of "conceptual blocks".

It's anything that blocks someone from having a good & creative idea.

✔️ Perceptual
✔️ Emotional
✔️ Cultural
✔️ Environmental
✔️ Intellectual

geni.us/A1as

History is a contradictory thing.

On the one hand, it is the past, what has happened.

On the other hand, it is the stories we tell ourselves about the past, the ways we construct, remember, forget, and weave together incidents and phenomena to create our own version of history. Both of these meanings are fraught with tension.

The first suggests that the past is unknowable – we can never know everything that happened, so our understanding of it is always partial.

The world used to call for two kinds of courage.

The first, heroic, was that of those who found the strength to fight adversity, to overcome the countless challenges that inevitably presented themselves. The second, philosophical, was the strength to happily accept one's destiny, no matter how difficult it might be.

Most studies find that power makes us worse people. But why? In an experiment called "the dictator game", one person is assigned to be the dictator and decides how to split a pot of money among the people in the experiment.

30 uncomfortable truths to make you think:

You cannot claim to stand for truth unless you call out lies on your own side, and in circumstances when your side might pay a price for such honesty. The function of democracy is not to prevent disagreement, but to make good use of it.

We can detect and respond to dangers before they happen. This is anxiety.

🧵 Anxiety works by anticipating and inhibiting.

It says: "Don't do that, you'll get hurt. Don't do that, you'll be disappointed. Don't do that, you'll embarrass yourself."

Nearly all anxious people believe and tell themselves that they are in danger of other people’s reactions to them. People who suffer from anxiety tell themselves:

"What other people think about me is of such crucial importance that I must anticipate it in advance of all my actions. I must do all I can in order to prevent others from thinking badly of me."

Much of our waking life is spent in a desperate struggle to persuade others that we are not what we fear ourselves to be.

🧵 The tacit belief to which most of us subscribe is that the majority of people are by and large pretty well adjusted, contented, and lead conventionally well ordered lives.

But most people keep the way they feel about themselves as a deep and shameful secret.

We cannot know anything with certainty.

🧵 Man is not the “rational animal,” but only the animal that is capable of rationality, as Jonathan Swift said in a letter to Alexander Pope.

"Three Times Wiser" is a newsletter about big ideas, mental models, brain bugs, and principles of wise thinking.

This thread will be updated on a daily basis.

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The future is getting more complicated.

Can we predict it? No.

Uncertainty in the actual fabric of the universe, and not just uncertainty in our minds.

But we can imagine the space of possible outcomes by trying to connect the dots. If you want to eat the future before the future eats you, you need to know what kind of creature the future is.

Rather than asking, “What do I know about the future,” it’s more helpful to ask, “How fast am I learning more about the future?”

Interesting framework describing the top-down and bottom-up components involved in the formation of collective beliefs.

From the book: "Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers"

Thread:

amzn.to/3dlXY9D Top-down, ideas take shape from the pens of Keynes’s academic scribblers. Those are philosophers, economists, and other thinkers whose main job is to produce ideas.

You have no idea how complex maritime container terminals are, a thread. First, a global overview of a maritime container terminal.

How to master complexity and problem solving in science and engineering?

Build insight and understanding first, so that you do not drown in complexity.

Approximations foster understanding.

A thread on Mastering Complexity:

amzn.to/3oon52p There are the two broad ways to master complexity: organize the complexity or discard it.

First, try organizing complexity either by dividing hard problems into manageable pieces or founding transferable/reusable ideas.

The @ideamarkets_'s whitepaper is very interesting (read the philosophy part:
docs.ideamarket.io

Here some highlights: In a world where media corporations are central banks of narrative, ideamarket.io want to be the credibility layer of the internet.

The money delusion, a thread.

Crusoe is stuck alone on a desert island.

For him, money is pointless.

When he finds some money on the beach, he wonders whether to pick it up.

No, he says to himself, it would be quite useless here. Indeed, he swears at it, calling it a drug, pleased to be finally free of it.

‘However’, Crusoe says in the story, ‘on second thoughts, I took it’.

Why does he do that?

What are the second thoughts that make him pick it up?

Some guiding principles for a good life: Be in alignment with what’s most important to you (your values).

@wolfejosh Biologically we are still ruled by primal emotions.

So our ability to reason and acquire knowledge is constrained. @wolfejosh Culturally we are still ruled by primitive myths.

So our ability to reason and acquire knowledge is stymied by an excessive emphasis and reliance on a past never to be seen again.

A monkey in a cage goes bananas, a thread.

Humans in modern environments are like monkeys at the zoo.

Evolutionary mismatch regarding diet, exercise and the nature of our modern social world affect life for many of us on a daily basis. You run into a higher total number of stranger each day than our ancestors ever would have.

Dunbar’s number of 150 is itty-bitty by any modern standards.

Did you ever notice that you get nervous giving a talk in front of a group of strangers?

Well, guess what?