Top Quotes

1. Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
    — WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy
2. “The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.” — Warren Buffett
3. More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
4. Confident people take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.
5. In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends
6. Never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.
7. It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis . . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.
    — EPICTETUS, Discourses
8. Our surroundings influence us — both our physical environment and the people around us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
9. Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.
10. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners. — Bill Walsh
11. Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.
12. No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others — Peter Kaufman

CHAPTER 1.1
Thinking Badly — or Not Thinking at All?

1. Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.
2. In the space between stimulus and response, one of two things can happen. You can consciously pause and apply reason to the situation. Or you can cede control and execute a default behavior.

The High Cost of Losing Control

1. Reacting without reasoning makes every situation worse.

Biological Instincts

1. Your mind is doing exactly what biology programmed it to do: act quickly and efficiently in response to threats, without wasting valuable time thinking.
2. This idea that we’re naturally prone to defend our territory is an idea I came across through Robert Ardrey’s book The Territorial Imperative: A Personal Inquiry into the Animal Origins of Property and Nations, as well as conversations with various people. While animals instinctively mark and defend their territory, I believe this biological instinct manifests itself in humans in a deeper and more nuanced way. We instinctively respond when people encroach on not only our physical territory but also our self-image. Since we wrap our identity into our jobs, when someone criticizes you at work, it’s akin to an animal walking into your territory. Certain bad actors use this very fact to get you off your game — they’ll criticize you or your role at the office in order to nudge you into reacting without reasoning.
3. We’re naturally wired to organize the world into a hierarchy. We do this to help make sense of the world, maintain our beliefs, and generally feel better.
4. We’re self-preserving. Most of us would never intentionally push someone else down to get where we want to go
5. Conscious processing takes both time and energy. Evolution favored stimulus-response shortcuts because they’re advantageous for the group: they enhance group fitness, group survival, and reproduction. As humans continued flourishing in groups, hierarchies developed, creating order out of chaos and giving us all a place. Territory is how we tried to avoid fighting others — you stay out of my territory, I’ll stay out of yours. And self-preservation means we choose survival over rules, norms, or customs.
6. In today’s world, basic survival is no longer in question. The very tendencies that once served us now often act as an anchor holding us in place, weakening our position, and making things harder than they need to be.

Knowing Your Defaults

1. The emotion default: we tend to respond to feelings rather than reasons and facts.
2. The ego default: we tend to react to anything that threatens our sense of self-worth or our position in a group hierarchy.
3. The social default: we tend to conform to the norms of our larger social group.
4. The inertia default: we’re habit forming and comfort seeking. We tend to resist change, and to prefer ideas, processes, and environments that are familiar.
5. There are no hard edges between defaults; they often bleed into one another. Each on their own is enough to cause unforced errors, but when they act together, things quickly go from bad to worse.
6. People who master their defaults get the best real-world results. It’s not that they don’t have a temper or an ego, they just know how to control both rather than be controlled by them. With the ability to think clearly in ordinary moments today, they consistently put themselves in a good position for tomorrow.

CHAPTER 1.2
The Emotion Default

From Emotion to Action

1. There’s a bit of Sonny in each of us. You experience anger, fear, or some other emotion, and feel compelled to act immediately. But in these moments, the action you’re pushed toward rarely serves you.
2. Anger at a rival prevents you from doing what’s in your own best interest. Fear of losing an opportunity pushes you to cut thinking short and act impulsively. Outrage at a criticism causes you to lash out in defense, alienating potential allies. The list goes on.
3. Emotions can multiply all of your progress by zero. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve thought about or worked at something, it can all be undone in an instant. No one is immune.
4. Be wary of sleep deprivation, hunger, fatigue, heightened emotions, distractions, the stress of feeling rushed, and unfamiliar surroundings. These conditions can impair your judgment, as emotions often take the lead in such scenarios.

CHAPTER 1.3
The Ego Default

Appearing Successful vs. Being Successful

1. Unearned knowledge rushes us to judgment. “I’ve got this,” we think. We convince ourselves that low-chance events are zero-chance events and think only of best-case outcomes. We feel immune to bad luck — to the bad things that happen to other people, because of our newfound (and false) sense of confidence. This idea of rushing to judgment with unearned knowledge is one I got from my friend Morgan Housel in “History’s Seductive Beliefs,” Collab (blog), Collaborative Fund, September 21, 2021, https://www.collabfund.com/blog/historys-seductive-beliefs/

Feeling Right over Being Right

1. Our desire to feel right overpowers our desire to be right.
2. The ego default urges us to feel right at the expense of being right.
3. We mistake how we want the world to be with how it actually is.
4. We mistake how we want the world to work for how it does work.
5. If you find yourself expending tremendous energy on how you are seen, if you often feel your pride being wounded, if you find yourself reading an article or two on a subject and thinking you’re an expert, if you always try to prove you’re right and have difficulty admitting mistakes, if you have a hard time saying “I don’t know,” or if you’re frequently envious of others or feel as though you’re never given the recognition you deserve — be on guard! Your ego is in charge.

CHAPTER 1.4
The Social Default

1. Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
    — WALTER LIPPMANN, The Stakes of Diplomacy
2. The social default inspires conformity. It coaxes us to fall in line with an idea or behavior simply because other people do. It embodies what the term “social pressure” refers to: wanting to belong to the crowd, fear of being an outsider, fear of being scorned, fear of disappointing other people.
3. Survival inside the tribe was hard but survival outside the tribe was impossible. Because we needed the group, our individual interests became secondary to the group interests.
4. The social rewards for going with the crowd are felt long before the benefits of going against it are gained.
5. The social default encourages us to outsource our thoughts, beliefs, and outcomes to others.
6. Paul Graham, “The Four Quadrants of Conformism,” July 2020, http://www.paulgraham.com/conformism.html.
7. One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded.
8. To be a successful scientist, for example, it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong
9. any process for deciding which ideas to ban is bound to make mistakes. All the more so because no one intelligent wants to undertake that kind of work, so it ends up being done by the stupid. And when a process makes a lot of mistakes, you need to leave a margin for error. Which in this case means you need to ban fewer ideas than you’d like to. But that’s hard for the aggressively conventional-minded to do, partly because they enjoy seeing people punished, as they have since they were children, and partly because they compete with one another. Enforcers of orthodoxy can’t allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned.

Lemmings Rarely Make History

1. The social default makes us fear being snubbed, ridiculed, and treated like an idiot. In most people’s minds, this fear of losing social capital outweighs any potential upsides of deviating from the social norm and disposes them to accept it.
2. Success requires shamelessness. So too does failure
3. Our desire to fit in often overpowers our desire for a better outcome.
4. The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and reasoning are correct.
5. if you find yourself exerting energy to fit in with a crowd, if you’re frequently fearful of disappointing other people, if you’re afraid of being an outsider, or if the threat of scorn fills you with dread, then beware! The social default is in charge.

CHAPTER 1.5
The Inertia Default

1. The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by inertia.
    — EDWARD L. BERNAYS, Propaganda
2. Starting something is hard but so too is stopping something.
3. The “zone of average” is a dangerous place when it comes to inertia. It’s the point where things are working well enough that we don’t feel the need to make any changes. We hope things will magically improve. Of course, they rarely do.

Doubling Down When You’re Wrong

1. Public statements can create inertia. Putting something on the record establishes expectations along with social pressure to meet those expectations.
2. Inertia also prevents us from doing hard things. The longer we avoid the hard thing we know we should do, the harder it becomes to do. Avoiding conflict is comfortable and easy. The longer we avoid the conflict, however, the more necessary it becomes to continue avoiding it. What starts out as avoiding a small but difficult conversation quickly grows into avoiding a large and seemingly impossible one. The weight of what we avoid eventually affects our relationship.
3. Groups create inertia of their own. They tend to value consistency over effectiveness, and reward people for maintaining the status quo. Inertia makes deviating from group norms difficult. The threat of standing out in a negative way too often keeps people in line. As a result, group dynamics end up favoring people who don’t deviate from the defaults.

CHAPTER 1.6
Default to Clarity

1. A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills.
    — ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
2. The people with the best defaults are typically the ones with the best environment.
3. Sometimes it’s part of a deliberate strategy, and sometimes it’s just plain luck.
4. The way to improve your defaults isn’t by willpower but by creating an intentional environment where your desired behavior becomes the default behavior.
5. Joining groups whose default behaviors are your desired behavior is an effective way to create an intentional environment. If you want to read more, join a book club. If you want to run more, join a running club. If you want to exercise more, hire a trainer. Your chosen environment, rather than your willpower alone, will help nudge you toward the best choices.

PART 2
BUILDING STRENGTH

1. Criticizing others is easier than coming to know yourself.
    — BRUCE LEE
2. Our defaults work off deeply ingrained biological tendencies — our tendencies for self-preservation, for recognizing and maintaining social hierarchies, and for defending ourselves and our territory. We can’t simply know these tendencies exist and then will them out of existence. On the contrary, the feeling that willpower is all it takes to remove these forces is one of the tricks they use to keep us under their control.
3. To stop our defaults from impeding good judgment, we need to harness equally powerful biological forces. We need to take the same forces that the defaults would use to ruin us and turn them to our advantage. Chief among them is the force of inertia.

CHAPTER 2.1
Self-Accountability

Excuses, Excuses

1. Complaining is not a strategy. You have to work with the world as you find it, not as you would have it be.
    — JEFF BEZOS
2. Too often, the people we ask for feedback are kind but not nice. Kind people will tell you things a nice person will not.
3. kind person will tell you that you have spinach on your teeth. A nice person won’t because it’s uncomfortable. A kind person will tell us what holds us back even when it’s uncomfortable. A nice person avoids giving us critical feedback because they’re worried about hurting out feelings. No wonder we end up thinking other people will be interested in our excuses
4. No one cares about your excuses as much as you do. In fact, no one cares about your excuses at all, except you.

No One Cares. It’s Your Fault

1. When people’s actions have outcomes that don’t line up with how they see themselves, they tend to insulate their egos by blaming other people or unfavorable circumstances.
2. Self-serving bias is also self-preserving. The self we’re preserving is our very sense of self — our identity.

Not Your Fault? It’s Still Your Responsibility

1. Our desire to protect ourselves prevents us from moving forward. It’s tempting to absolve yourself, throwing your hands up and claiming you have no control over the situation you’ve landed in. And sure, sometimes that’s true. There are circumstances of chance that have a negative impact. People suffer misfortune all the time for reasons beyond their control: stray bullets, diseases, getting struck by a drunk driver.
2. Complaining does nothing to change the present situation you find yourself in, though. Thinking about how it wasn’t your fault doesn’t make anything better. The consequences are still yours to deal with.
3. Always focus on the next move, the one that gets you closer or further from where you want to go.
4. “Anyone can steer the ship when the sea is calm”
5. One of the most common mistakes people make is bargaining with how the world should work instead of accepting how it does work.
6. Failing to accept how the world really works puts your time and energy toward proving how right you are. When the desired results don’t materialize, it’s easy to blame circumstances or others. I call this the wrong side of right. You’re focused on your ego not the outcome.
7. Solutions appear when you stop bargaining and start accepting the reality of the situation. That’s because focusing on the next move, rather than how you got here in the first place, opens you up to a lot of possibilities. When you put outcome over ego, you get better results.

How You Respond Can Always Make Things Better or Worse

1. You can’t control everything, but you can control your response, which makes circumstances better or worse.
2. Each response has an impact on the future, taking you either a step closer to or a step further from the outcomes you want and the person you want to be.
3. “Is this behavior moving you closer to what you want or further away?”
4. “Will this action make the future easier or harder?”
5. This surprisingly simple question helps change your perspective on the situation and avoid making things worse. As my grandfather (and many others) used to say, “If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you need to do is stop digging.”

Complaining Is Not a Solution

1. Facing reality is hard. It’s much easier to blame things we have no control over than look for our own contributions.
2. Too often we fight against the feedback the world gives us, to protect our beliefs. Rather than changing ourselves, we want the world to change. And if we don’t have the power to change it, we do the only thing we feel we can do: complain.
3. Complaining isn’t productive. It only misleads you into thinking that the world should function in a way that it doesn’t. Distancing yourself from reality makes it harder to solve the problems you face. There is always something you can do today to make the future easier, though, and the moment you stop complaining is the moment you start finding it.

You Are Not a Victim

1. The most important story is the one you tell yourself. While telling yourself a positive story doesn’t ensure a good outcome, telling yourself a negative story often guarantees a bad one.
2. When you constantly blame circumstances, the environment, or other people, you are effectively claiming that you had little ability to affect the outcome. But that’s not what actually happened. The truth is that we make repeated choices in life that become habits, those habits determine our paths, and those paths determine our outcomes. When we explain away those unwanted outcomes, we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for producing them.
3. There’s a word for people who always respond to problems by blaming others or circumstances: victims. Of course, they’re often not actually victims. They just feel like they are, and that feeling gets in the way of good judgment. Chronic victims feel helpless, powerless, and often hopeless. Nothing is ever their fault; it is always someone or something else that got in the way. No one begins life wanting to be a chronic victim, but the slow accumulation of responses that avoid responsibility makes it hard for people to see that’s what they’re becoming. Eventually, it’s just who they are.
4. It’s so much easier to hide and to blame other people, circumstances, or luck.
5. No successful person wants to work with a chronic victim. The only people who want to work with victims are other victims.
6. If you pay attention to chronic victims, you’ll notice how fragile they are — how dependent their attitudes and feelings are on things they don’t control. When things go their way, they’re happy; when things don’t, they’re defensive, passive-aggressive, and occasionally aggressive-aggressive.
7. Self-accountability is the strength of realizing that even though you don’t control everything, you do control how you respond to everything. It’s a mindset that empowers you to act and not just react to whatever life throws at you. It transforms obstacles into opportunities for learning and growth. It means realizing that the way you respond to hardship matters more to your happiness than the hardship itself.

CHAPTER 2.2
Self-Knowledge

1. Know thyself.
    — INSCRIPTION ON THE TEMPLE OF APOLLO AT DELPHI
2. When you play games where other people have the aptitude and you don’t, you’re going to lose. You have to figure out where you have an edge and stick to it — Charlie Munger
3. Self-knowledge isn’t limited just to hard skills, though. It’s also about knowing when you’re vulnerable to your defaults — the kinds of situations where circumstances do the thinking for you.
4. Maybe you’re prone to being overly emotional — to sadness, anger, or intrusive self-defeating thoughts. Maybe you have a short temper when you’re tired, or you become an ogre when you’re hungry. Maybe you’re acutely sensitive to social pressure and the threat of social scorn.
5. Knowing about your strengths and weaknesses, your abilities and their limits is essential to counteracting your defaults. If you don’t know your vulnerabilities, your defaults will exploit them to gain control of your circumstances.

CHAPTER 2.3
Self-Control

1. Give me that man
   That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
   In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart.
    — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
2. Self-control is the ability to master your fears, desires, and other emotions.
3. Self-control is about creating space for reason instead of just blindly following instincts.
4. It’s about being able to view and manage your emotions as if they were inanimate objects — things that don’t have the power to determine what you do unless you let them.
5. The emotion default tries to remove any distance between you and your emotions, triggering a reaction in the absence of any deliberation. It wants to win the present moment, even if it means sabotaging the future. Self-control empowers you to keep emotion in check, though.
6. What’s truly frightening is that some adults are only marginally better than a toddler at fending it off. These are people who lack self-control and are routinely carried away by their emotions.
7. A large part of achieving success is having the self-control to do whatever needs to be done, regardless of whether you feel like doing it at the moment.
8. Emotional intensity is far less important in the long run than disciplined consistency.
9. Inspiration and excitement might get you going, but persistence and routine are what keep you going until you reach your goals.

CHAPTER 2.4
Self-Confidence

1. You need self-confidence to think independently and to stand firm in the face of social pressure, ego, inertia, or emotion.
2. Children develop self-confidence when they learn simple skills like pulling up a zipper, tying their shoes, or riding a bike. Eventually, that self-confidence evolves and propels them to develop more complex abilities as adults — for instance, writing software, painting murals, or cheering up a disheartened friend.

Confidence vs. Ego

1. More dreams die from a lack of confidence than a lack of competence.
2. It’s important to talk to yourself about the adversity you’ve faced, because past hardship is where you get the confidence to face future hardship.
3. Confident people take their feedback from reality, not popular opinion.

Confidence and Honesty

1. The quicker you stop denying inconvenient truths and start responding to difficult realities, the better.
2. We all have something that we’re denying right now because accepting it is hard, and we want to avoid the pain.
3. The quicker you accept reality, though, the quicker you can deal with the implications, and the sooner you do that, the easier those implications are to manage.
4. People with self-confidence are honest about their own motivations, actions, and results
5. Reality isn’t a popularity contest.
6. Unsuccessful hires are too focused on proving they’re right instead of being right

The Wrong Side of Right

1. When everything is on your shoulders and the cost of being wrong is high, I told her, you tend to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right. The more I’d given up wanting to be right, the better the outcomes I had. I didn’t care about getting the credit; I cared about getting the results.
2. Self-confidence is the strength to focus on what’s right instead of who’s right.
3. Outcome over ego.

CHAPTER 2.5
Strength in Action

1. Self-accountability, self-knowledge, self-control, and self-confidence are essential to exercising good judgment

Example 2: Resisting the Social Default

1. Never say yes to something important without thinking it over for a day.
2. Automatic rules for common situations get results.
3. Knowing your vulnerability to social pressure and the limits of your power to resist it requires self-knowledge. Deciding to do something about this vulnerability to secure better outcomes involves self-confidence. Following the rule you’ve made for yourself takes self-accountability. And overcoming short-term discomfort in ordinary moments for long-term gain displays self-control.

CHAPTER 2.6
Setting the Standards

1. It is inevitable if you enter into relations with people on a regular basis . . . that you will grow to be like them. . . . Place an extinguished piece of coal next to a live one, and either it will cause the other one to die out, or the live one will make the other reignite. . . . Remember that if you consort with someone covered in dirt you can hardly avoid getting a little grimy yourself.
    — EPICTETUS, Discourses
2. Our surroundings influence us — both our physical environment and the people around us. Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people. It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
3. We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later you become selfish. If you hang around someone who’s unkind, you’ll slowly become unkind. Little by little, you adopt the thoughts and feelings, the attitudes and standards of the people around you. The changes are too gradual to notice until they’re too large to address.
4. Becoming like the people around you means that over time you come to adopt their standards. If all you see are average people, you will end up with average standards. But average standards aren’t going to get you where you want to go. Standards become habits, and habits become outcomes. Few people realize that exceptional outcomes are almost always achieved by people with higher-than-average standards.
5. The most successful people have the highest standards, not only for others but for themselves
6. Champions don’t create the standards of excellence. The standards of excellence create champions.
7. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions. They have a winning standard of performance before they are winners.

Smart People with Low Standards

1. The difference between average and exceptional results for a leader often comes down to whether they’re consistently getting more out of smart but otherwise lazy people.
2. Someone creates a half-assed draft of something that’s full of poor thinking, sends it around, and waits for others to correct it. This tactic takes advantage of one of our defaults: we love correcting people. If someone does something wrong, we almost can’t help but tell them how to do it the right way. So you do the work, and they get the credit in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken them to do it themselves. Smart. But lazy.

Excellence Demands Excellence

1. A master communicator wouldn’t accept a ponderous, rambling email. A master programmer wouldn’t accept ugly code. Neither of them would accept unclear explanations as understanding.
2. We’ll never be exceptional at anything unless we raise our standards, both of ourselves and of what’s possible. For most of us, that sounds like a lot of work. We gravitate toward being soft and complacent. We’d rather coast. That’s fine. Just realize this: if you do what everyone else does, you can expect the same results that everyone else gets. If you want different results, you need to raise the bar.
3. Working with a master firsthand is the best education; it’s the surest way of raising the bar.

CHAPTER 2.7
Exemplars + Practice

1. If you don’t curate the people in your life, the people who end up surrounding you will be there by chance and not by choice. That group includes your parents, your friends, your family, your coworkers.
2. Sure, your high school friends might be great examples of character and acumen, but odds are they’re average. Sure, your parents might be some of the smartest businesspeople in the world, but odds are they’re not.

Your Exemplars

1. Show me your role models and I’ll show you your future.
2. When you choose the right exemplars — people with standards higher than yours — you can transcend the standards you’ve inherited from parents, friends, and acquaintances.
3. No technique has been more responsible for my success in life than studying and adopting the good models of others — Peter Kaufman
4. People at the far right of the bell curve (the positive outliers) can teach you tips, tricks, and insights that might otherwise take a lifetime to learn. They’ve done the heavy lifting. They’ve already paid for the lessons, so you don’t have to

To explore the evolution of neural network architectures in deep learning, particularly in the context of generative models and natural language processing (NLP), we can trace the significant advancements from traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to more sophisticated models like PixelRNN, WaveNet, and Transformers. This post delves into these innovations, highlighting their implications for efficiency and performance in machine learning tasks.

The Shift from RNNs to PixelRNN and WaveNet

Initially, RNNs were the go-to architecture for sequential data processing, particularly in NLP tasks. However, their limitations became apparent as the complexity of tasks increased. The introduction of PixelRNN marked a pivotal transition. By employing masked convolutions, PixelRNN eliminated the reliance on RNNs, allowing for more efficient processing of image data by predicting pixels in a sequential manner while maintaining the spatial structure of images. This shift laid the groundwork for subsequent models like WaveNet, which adapted similar principles to audio generation, modeling raw audio waveforms with unprecedented accuracy and naturalness.

Advancements in Attention Mechanisms

The rise of attention mechanisms, particularly in the form of Transformers, revolutionized how models handle dependencies in data. Unlike RNNs, which process sequences in a linear fashion, Transformers utilize self-attention to weigh the importance of different parts of the input data simultaneously. This approach not only enhances parallelization but also allows for capturing long-range dependencies more effectively. The self-attention operator in Transformers, which does not have parameters, further simplifies the architecture, making it more scalable and efficient compared to traditional models.

The Role of Generative Models

Generative models have gained traction in recent years, with frameworks like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) leading the charge. These models learn to generate new data that resembles training data, which is crucial in various applications, from image synthesis to text generation. The insights from the “sentiment neuron” paper by Radford and Sutskever underscore the importance of unsupervised learning, demonstrating that large language models can learn common sense and natural language understanding from vast datasets without explicit supervision.

Scaling and Efficiency

Scaling models has become a focal point in the development of deep learning systems. OpenAI’s GPT-3, with its 175 billion parameters trained on 300 billion tokens, exemplifies the trend toward larger models capable of performing complex tasks with minimal fine-tuning. The scaling laws observed in these models indicate that performance improves with increased data and parameters, leading to significant advancements in capabilities.

The Future of Model Architectures

Looking ahead, the concept of decoupling reasoning from factual knowledge presents an intriguing avenue for research. By developing smaller, specialized models focused on reasoning tasks, we can reduce the computational burden while maintaining high performance. This approach aligns with the idea of recursive self-improvement and iterative learning, where models continuously refine their capabilities through interaction and feedback. The potential for self-supervised post-training to lead to an “intelligence explosion” suggests a future where AI systems can autonomously enhance their reasoning and decision-making abilities.

Conclusion

The evolution from RNNs to advanced architectures like PixelRNN, WaveNet, and Transformers illustrates a significant transformation in how we approach machine learning. By leveraging attention mechanisms, generative models, and scaling strategies, researchers are paving the way for more efficient and capable AI systems. As we continue to explore the decoupling of reasoning from factual knowledge, the future of AI promises even more innovative solutions to complex problems.

Top Quotes

1. An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.
2. Knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
3. Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.
4. A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives — not their performance relative to one another — minimizes mimetic rivalries.
5. If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones: People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things.
6. The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.
7. It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents.
8. Think seriously about the people you least want to see succeed. Those are your models.
9. The Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily — they seem like gifts — while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
10. Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music
11. While everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.
12. We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t. That’s because rivalry is a function of proximity.
13. Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert. Experts are crowned mimetically, like fashion.
14. The effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch.
15. What we commonly call “social media” is more than media — it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things.
16. Few things are more mimetic than aggression
17. Karl Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess
18. Shakespeare thought people fight when they are similar. The more that people in a group are alike, the more vulnerable they are to a single tension affecting the whole.
19. Mimetic desire breeds rivalries, which breed collisions and conflict.
20. We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches. We used to blame droughts on witches; once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought
21. We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems — James Clear
22. Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis.
23. All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone — Blaise Pascal
24. When desires converge on the same object, conflict is inevitable. The real danger of AI is not robots that might one day be smarter than us but that might want the same things that we want: our job, our spouse, our dreams.
25. The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought. — Yuval Harari
26. Amazon mediates desire for things. Google mediates desire for information itself
27. Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want — Naval Ravikant

PREFACE

1. Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world— Aristotle
2. We want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again— Dayna Tortorici
3. Wanting well, like thinking clearly, is not an ability we’re born with. It’s a freedom we have to earn
4. Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn — through imitation — to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged.
5. Mimetic desire is like gravity — it just is. Gravity is always at work.

INTRODUCTION

Social Gravity

1. An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie.
2. Girard read literature from Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Proust, etc. He discovered something striking: Characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior — most of all, their desires.
3. Girard’s discovery was like the Newtonian revolution in physics, in which the forces governing the movement of objects can only be understood in a relational context. Desire, like gravity, does not reside autonomously in any one thing or person. It lives in the space between them
4. The novels Girard taught are not primarily plot-driven or character-driven. They are desire-driven

Messing Up Maslow

1. Girard discovered that we come to desire many things not through biological drives or pure reason, nor as a decree of our illusory and sovereign self, but through imitation.
2. Knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need.
3. For Girard, desire is the most salient feature of the human condition and imitation the most fundamental feature of human behavior.
4. Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models — not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system — that shape our desires. With these models, people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis.
5. As humans have evolved, people have spent less time concerned about surviving and more time striving for things — less time in the world of needs and more time in the world of desire.

The Evolution of Desire

1. Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence
2. Girard was an autodidact with wide range. He studied anthropology, philosophy, theology, and literature. He found that mimetic desire was closely related to violence, especially the idea of sacrifice
3. In Girard’s view, the root of most violence is mimetic desire.
4. The reason we domesticated animals according to Girard: communities integrated the animals into their lives in order to sacrifice them. Sacrifices are more effective when they come from within a community — when the victim has something in common with the sacrificers.
5. When competitive rivalries flared up within Peter Thiel’s company, he gave each employee clearly defined and independent tasks so they didn’t compete with one another for the same responsibilities
6. A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives — not their performance relative to one another — minimizes mimetic rivalries.
7. Facebook was built around identity — that is to say, desires. It helps people see what other people have and want. It is a platform for finding, following, and differentiating oneself from models.

What’s at Stake

1. Mimetic desire, because it is social, spreads from person to person and through a culture.
2. History is the story of human desire.
3. Mimesis can hijack our noblest ambitions
4. Homogenizing forces are creating a crisis of desire: Equality is good. Sameness is generally not — unless we’re talking about cars on an assembly line or the consistency of your favorite brand of coffee. The more that people are forced to be the same — the more pressure they feel to think and feel and want the same things — the more intensely they fight to differentiate themselves.
5. Many cultures have had a myth in which twins commit violence against each other.
6. There are at least five separate stories of sibling rivalry in the book of Genesis alone: Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Stories of sibling rivalry are universal because they’re true — the more people are alike, the more likely they are to feel threatened. While technology is bringing the world closer together (Facebook’s stated mission), it is bringing our desires closer together and amplifying conflict
7. Sustainability depends on desirability: It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive — in other words, desirable.
8. If people don’t find positive outlets for their desires, they will find destructive ones: People don’t fight because they want different things; they fight because mimetic desire causes them to want the same things. The terrorists would not have been driven to destroy symbols of the West’s wealth and culture if, at some deep level, they had not secretly desired some of the same things.
9. The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.
10. It’s necessary to visit hell so we never become permanent residents.
11. The greatest developments in history are the result of someone wanting something that did not yet exist — and helping others to want more than they thought was wantable.

Part I: THE POWER OF MIMETIC DESIRE

Chapter 1: HIDDEN MODELS

Romantic Lies, Infant Truth

1. We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come— Milan Kundera
2. Julius Caesar was an excellent Romantic liar. After his victory at the battle of Zela, he declared, “Veni, vidi, vici” (I came, I saw, I conquered). Magician James Warren suggests that we reframe Caesar’s words in the language of desire so we see what he’s truly claiming: I came, I saw, I desired. And therefore he conquered.
3. Desire requires models — people who endow things with value for us merely because they want the things.

1. We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things that we don’t currently have, especially things that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction.
2. Models are like people standing a hundred yards up the road who can see something around the corner that we can’t yet see.
3. We never see the things we want directly; we see them indirectly, like refracted light. We are attracted to things when they are modeled to us in an attractive way, by the right model. Our universe of desire is as big or as small as our models.

Secrets Babies Keep

1. Desire is our primordial concern. Long before people can articulate why they want something, they start wanting it.
2. Mirror neuron

Torches of Freedom

1. Brill told Bernays that the cigarette is a phallic symbol that represents male sexual power. In order to turn cigarettes into an object important enough for women to fight for, Bernays would have to make smoking seem like a way for women to challenge male power. Cigarettes had to become, in Brill’s words, “torches of freedom.”
2. In order for that to happen, Bernays would have to give women a model.
3. Bernays gave the illusion of autonomy — because that’s how people think desire works. Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is their own.

Mimetic Games

1. Think seriously about the people you least want to see succeed. Those are your models.
2. People don’t only model the desire for third parties or objects; they can also model the desire for themselves

RISKY BUSINESS

1. Elite colleges don’t keep their admissions rates low because they have to; they keep them low to protect the value of their brands.
2. It’s the Paradox of Importance: sometimes the most important things in our lives come easily — they seem like gifts — while many of the least important things are the ones that, in the end, we worked the hardest for.
3. Podcast Entitled Opinions with Robert Harrison

ADVERTISING IRONY

1. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food.
2. The pride that makes a person believe they are unaffected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.
3. On a human level, social media companies have built engines of desire.

Models That Move Markets

1. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their investment philosophies — Shakespeare
2. Millions of people were searching Google to find out whether they should buy Tesla based on whether other people wanted to buy Tesla. This, in my view, is not merely information. It’s mimetic desire.
3. Desire is not a function of data. It’s a function of other people’s desires. What stock market analysts referred to as “mass psychosis” was not so psychotic after all. It was the phenomenon of mimetic desire that Girard had discovered more than fifty years earlier.
4. In both bubbles and crashes, models are multiplied. Desire spreads at a speed so great we can’t wrap out rational brains around it. We might consider taking a different, more human, perspective.
5. “Conformity is a powerful force that can counteract gravity for longer than skeptics expect. Bubbles are neither rational nor irrational; they are profoundly human, and they will always be with us” — Jason Zweig

CHAPTER 2: DISTORTED REALITY

We’re All Freshmen Again

1. Friedland taught Jobs that strange or shocking behavior mesmerizes people. People are drawn to others who seem to play by different rules. (Reality TV exploits this)
2. When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis — anti-mimetic, even. And that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t.
3. Our ability to imitate in complex ways is why we have language, recipes, and music
4. Models and mediators are the same thing. Mediation is what models do — they give their subjects new eyes to see and value things in a new light.
5. While everyone’s flattered by imitation, being copied too closely feels threatening.
6. Celebristan is where models live who mediate — or bring about changes in our desires — from somewhere outside our social sphere, and with whom we have no immediate and direct possibility of competing on the same basis.
7. We’re more threatened by people who want the same things as us than by those who don’t. That’s because rivalry is a function of proximity.
8. When people are separated from us by enough time, space, money, or status, there is no way to compete seriously with them for the same opportunities. We don’t view models in Celebristan as threatening because they probably don’t care enough about us to adopt our desires as their own.
9. People are in close contact and unspoken rivalry is common. Tiny differences are amplified. Models who live in Freshmanistan occupy the same social space as their imitators.
10. In Celebristan, there is always a barrier that separates the models from their imitators. They might be separated from us by time (because dead), space (because they live in a different country or aren’t on social media), or social status (a billionaire, rock star, or member of a privileged class).
11. Models and mediators are the same thing. Mediation is what models do — they give their subjects new eyes to see and value things in a new light.
12. Because there’s no threat of conflict, they are generally imitated freely and openly.
13. Mimetic desire is both the bond and the bane of many friendships.

DISTORTION 1: THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF WONDER

1. Desire is not of this world. It is in order to penetrate into another world that one desires, it is in order to be initiated into a radically foreign existence. — Rene Girard
2. If someone falls under the influence of a model who mediates the desire for a handbag, it’s not the handbag they are after. It’s the imagined newness of being they think it will bring.
3. Don’t always try to pet a cat when you encounter one on the street, as popular psychologist Jordan Peterson advises in his 12 Rules for Life. Rather, make the cat want to get petted when it encounters you.

DISTORTION 2: THE CULT OF EXPERTS

1. Experts are the ones who help mediate desires, who tell us what is worth wanting and what is not.
2. There’s such demand for new models that we insert mediators of desire where they don’t belong — like Shark Tank–style business pitch competitions where experts, rather than the market, decide whether a business is valuable. We’re model addicts. Right now, the models we prefer are experts.
3. Authority is more mimetic than we like to believe. The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert.
4. Experts are crowned mimetically, like fashion.
5. People find “experts” whose expertise is largely a product of mimetic validation
6. It’s less likely that experts will be mimetically chosen in the hard sciences (physics, math, chemistry) because people have to show their work
7. But it’s easy for someone to become an overnight expert on “productivity” merely because they got published in the right place. Scientism fools people because it is a mimetic game dressed up as science.
8. The key is carefully curating our sources of knowledge so that we are able to get down to what is true regardless of how many other people want to believe it. And that means doing the work.

DISTORTION 3: REFLEXIVITY

1. People worry about what other people will think before they say something — which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.
2. This principle affects public and personal discourse. The German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined the term “spiral of silence” in 1974 to refer to a phenomenon that we see often today: People’s willingness to speak freely depends upon their unconscious perceptions of how popular their opinions are. People who believe their opinions are not shared by anyone else are more likely to remain quiet; their silence itself increases the impression that no one else thinks as they do; this increases their feelings of isolation and artificially inflates the confidence of those with the majority opinion.
3. Reflexivity is everywhere, clothes, architecture, financial markets, etc.
4. In situations where desirous participants have the possibility of interacting with each other, there is a two-way interaction between the participants’ desires
5. The reflexivity of desire is most apparent in rivalrous relationships. When a person is focused on what a rival model wants, the desires of both individuals are reflexive. Neither can want anything without affecting the other’s desire for it.
6. In Freshmanistan, a mimetic rivalry is like two people trying to race each other inside of the same car: Nobody gets ahead, and eventually they crash.

SIGNIFIED RAPPERS

1. The mimetic rivalry between Tupac and Biggie ended with both of them dead.
2. When mimesis is strong enough, rivals forget about whatever objects they were fighting for in the first place. Objects become completely interchangeable — the rivals will fight for anything, so long as their opponent wants it. They become locked in a double bind — each reflexively bound to the desires of the other, unable to escape.

MIRRORED IMITATION

1. Mirrored imitation, then, is imitation that does the opposite of whatever a rival does. It is reflexive to a rival by doing something different from what the rival models.
2. The effort to leave the beaten paths forces everyone into the same ditch. — Girard
3. The more accurately a work of art represents real human relations, the more it involves mimesis
4. I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members. — Groucho Marx
5. In a mimetic rivalry, objects take on value because the rival wants them.

Social Mediation

1. What we commonly call “social media” is more than media — it’s mediation: thousands of people showing us what to want and coloring our perception of those things.
2. Smartphones projects the desires of billions of people to us through social media, Google searches, and restaurant and hotel reviews. The neurological addictiveness of smartphones is real; but our addiction to the desires of others, which smartphones give us unfettered access to, is the metaphysical threat.
3. Mimetic desire is the real engine of social media. Social media is social mediation — and it now brings nearly all of our models inside our personal world

Chapter 3

SOCIAL CONTAGION

Cycles of Desire

1. If individuals are naturally inclined to desire what their neighbors possess, or to desire what their neighbors even simply desire, this means that rivalry exists at the very heart of human social relations. This rivalry, if not thwarted, would permanently endanger harmony and even the survival of all human communities — Rene Girard
2. Few things are more mimetic than aggression
3. Karl Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess
4. Shakespeare thought people fight when they are similar. The more that people in a group are alike, the more vulnerable they are to a single tension affecting the whole.
5. Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy
6. In Freshmanistan, the proximity and similarity of people make the stakes of mimetic desire higher

Lamborghini versus Ferrari

1. It had taken Lamborghini ten years to become one of Italy’s most successful tractor makers. It would take only two years for him to become one of the most admired carmakers in the world

Memes and Mimetic Theory

1. Darwin was attempting to explain the spread across time and space of nonmaterial things such as ideas, behaviors, and phrases. He called these things memes: cultural units of information that spread from person to person through a process of imitation
2. Memes don’t spread through human intentionality or creativity. As in Darwinian evolution, they undergo a series of random mutations and selections.
3. The individuals who spread memes are simply carriers — hosts through whom the information passes.
4. According to Dawkins, memes work in a similar way to biological genes: their survival depends on their being passed on and replicated as perfectly as possible. They might mutate every once in a while. But in general, memes are discrete, static, and fixed.
5. According to meme theory, the spread of memes through imitation leads to the development and sustainability of culture. According to Girard’s mimetic theory, culture is formed primarily through the imitation of desires, not things. And desires are not discrete, static, and fixed; they are open-ended, dynamic, and volatile.
6. In Girard’s mimetic theory, the opposite is true. People are not insignificant carriers of information; they are highly significant models of desire.
7. We don’t care about what is being modeled as much as we care about who is modeling it. We imitate not for the sake of imitation itself but for the sake of differentiating ourselves — to try to forge an identity relative to other people.

The Flywheel Effect

1. Cycle 1 is the negative cycle, in which mimetic desire leads to rivalry and conflict. This cycle runs on the false belief that other people have something that we don’t have and that there isn’t room for fulfillment of both their desires and ours. It comes from a mindset of scarcity, of fear, of anger.
2. Cycle 2 is the positive cycle in which mimetic desire unites people in a shared desire for some common good. It comes from a mindset of abundance and mutual giving. This type of cycle transforms the world. People want something that they couldn’t imagine wanting before — and they help others go further, too.
3. There is not a linear process of continuous improvement but a critical transition point at which momentum takes over and the process begins to power itself. Mimesis, too, works like the flywheel. It accelerates in a nonlinear way — in both positive and negative cases.

The Creative Cycle

1. Fitness Flywheel:(1) I want to start working out, because my friend started a new workout program and looks great. (2) That makes me want to eat better, so that I don’t negate my hard work at the gym. (3) So I want to turn down social invites that involve booze and Buffalo wings. (4) The result is that I want to go to the gym in the morning rather than pop Advil, slam coffee, and eat pancakes. (5) And that means I want to spend more time doing productive work. Eventually, I make wellness a virtue — meaning it becomes easy. Making healthy choices becomes something that I want to do instead of something I dread.
2. According to Collins, the movement of a flywheel works due to a cannot help but logic: you can’t help but take the next step.
3. Giro Sport design followed this logic. If you make superior products, elite athletes can’t help but want to wear them. If you get elite athletes to use your product, you can’t help but attract the attention of mainstream consumers. And if you attract the attention of mainstream consumers, you can’t help but build brand power. And when you have brand power, you can’t help but increase your margins.
4. Regenerative farms use positive flywheels. The farms are built around the health of their soil. The flywheel works like this: Plants grow best in good soil, so you boost the biodiversity of the plants; which leads to healthier ruminants who eat the grass and the plants, and then poop; which leads to healthier soil; which means that water and beneficial microbes are retained better; which leads to even more nutrient-rich soil; which increases the vitality of the entire ecosystem.
5. There are also negative flywheels, or “doom loops,” where negative forces build on one another and lead to failure. A doom loop might work like this: An e-commerce company takes its focus off customer service to invest in other areas; which causes increased credit card chargebacks and bad website reviews; which leads to a decrease in order volume and returning customers; which causes a decrease in sales and inventory turnover; which forces the company to pay vendors late; which causes vendors to tighten credit terms and withhold inventory; which causes the company to focus even less on customer service because they are just trying to keep the lights on. Notice that the last of these stages leads right back to the first stage, amplifying the problem.
6. Negative flywheels are far more common than positive ones.

The Destructive Cycle

MOVING TO FRESHMANISTAN

1. He suggested that the illusion of freedom — the idea that every entrepreneur is a master of their own desire — is dangerous — Dr. Zubin Damania
2. Desire is part of the web of connectivity. When people deny that they are affected by what other people around them want, they are most susceptible to getting drawn into an unhealthy cycle of desire that they don’t even know to resist.
3. Mimetic desire breeds rivalries, which breed collisions and conflict.
4. Every community in a mimetic crisis — that is, every community that suffers a loss of difference, where there is no clear separation between models and imitators — has its own version of the Cycle 2 flywheel

RETURN ON COLLISIONS

UNDER THE ANTHILL

1. Zappos had eliminated the management hierarchy, but they couldn’t eliminate the network of desire and the need that people have to be in relationship to models. There is always a hierarchy of desire from the perspective of an individual: some models are worth following more than others, and some things are worth wanting more than others. We are hierarchical creatures. This is why we like listicles and ratings so much. We have a need to know how things stack up, how things fit together. To remove all semblance of hierarchy is detrimental to this fundamental need.
2. People always pursue happiness by looking for models of happiness — whether that is someone who has lived the American dream, a Silicon Valley CEO, or your next-door neighbor.

1. C. S. Lewis called this invisible system the inner ring. It means that no matter where a person is in life, no matter how wealthy or popular a person is, there is always a desire to be on the inside of a certain ring and a terror of being left on the outside of it. “This desire [to be in the inner ring] is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action,” Lewis said. “It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it — this whole pell-mell of struggle competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement.… As long as you are governed by that desire, you will never get what you want.

Hierarchical Values

1. A good leader needs to consider the impact of their decisions on human ecology — the web of relationships that affect human life and development. No aspect of human ecology is more overlooked than mimetic desire.
2. Leaders should also consider that economic incentives are always more than economic. If the signals are strong enough, they can distort desires and give people a “false north” on their career compass
3. You can influence behavior with financial incentives, no doubt — but economic incentives alone don’t explain why people are captivated by certain models. You can’t buy desire. When we subsidize risk, we are left with a distorted view of who wants what. Sometimes, that person is us.
4. Marketing, money, and models distort desire for people if there is no clear hierarchy of values.
5. Values and desires are not the same thing.
6. Whether we recognize it or not, our minds think in hierarchies all of the time — whether it’s related to our daily to-do list, the priority of issues in an election, or even a glance at a menu in a restaurant (appetizers, main course, dessert). Without a hierarchy of values, which helps form and direct desires, we can’t even begin to think about what to pay attention to and to what degree.
7. A hierarchy of values is an antidote to mimetic conformity. If all values are treated as equal, then the one that wins out — especially at a time of crisis — is the one that is most mimetic.
8. Remember that conflict is caused by sameness, not by difference. If everything is equally good or important, the propensity for conflict is higher. Don’t contribute to the tyranny of relativism. It has too many tyrants as it is.

The Collapse of Desire

1. Value systems with a clear hierarchy are more effective during crises than systems of values that lack a hierarchy.

Chapter 4: THE INVENTION OF BLAME

An Underrated Social Discovery

I wonder if some aspect of human nature evolved in the context of competing packs. We might be genetically wired to be vulnerable to the lure of the mob.… What’s to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture?

— Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and philosopher

DISASTER DRAWS PEOPLE LIKE FLIES.

SPECTATORS GET CHILLS BY IDENTIFYING

WITH THE VICTIMS, FEELING IMMUNE ALL

THE WHILE! THIS IS A PARTICULARLY

UNATTRACTIVE FORM OF VOYEURISM

— Jenny Holzer

Sacred Violence

1. War is nothing but a duel on a larger scale — Carl Von Clausewitz
2. In his study of history, Girard found that humans time and time again turned to sacrifice in order to stop the spread of mimetic conflict.
3. When societies were threatened with disorder, they used violence to drive out violence. They would expel or destroy a chosen person or group, and this action would have the effect of preventing more widespread violence. Girard called the process by which this happens the scapegoat mechanism.
4. The scapegoat mechanism, turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one. It brings temporary peace as people forget their mimetic conflicts for a while, having just discharged all of their anger onto a scapegoat.
5. The institutions and cultural norms that we find around us, especially sacred rituals like elections and capital punishment, as well as many taboos, are mechanisms that were developed to contain violence

The Danger of Purity

1. Catharsis: the process of releasing strong emotions or impulses through participation in some external event. Aristotle thought catharsis was the purpose of tragic drama.
2. Because eliminating the pharmakós (poison) was a collective and anonymous process, the benefits flowed to everyone.
3. Unanimous violence is always anonymous violence.
4. Nobody is safe from being made into a scapegoat. During a mimetic crisis, perception is distorted. In Freshmanistan, where differences are minor, even the smallest differences are amplified. People project their worst fears onto a scapegoat rather than face the crisis head-on. Nobody wants to pay the price.

Saving People from Themselves

1. The pool is Freshmanistan; the people in the pool are caught in a mimetic crisis; the electricity represents the acute and serious danger that the group has brought on itself — the mimetic contagion that travels quickly from person to person and incapacitates them, making them incapable of solving the crisis on their own
2. We can’t predict when the wisdom of the crowd becomes the violence of the mob
3. Accusations are dangerously mimetic.
4. The first accusation is the hardest. Why? Because there’s no model for it. Only in the light of overwhelming evidence would most of us accuse a person of something truly terrible. But in a situation of extreme fear or confusion, the standards change. A person can take on the appearance of an evil perpetrator more easily in a war zone than in a well-run classroom.
5. The first accusation, even if it’s completely false, changes the perception of reality. It affects one’s memory and perception of new events. And with each new accusation, there are more models. The number of models is why the second accusation is easier than the first to make, the third accusation is easier than the second, the fourth easier than the third.
6. Models spur people to action. Sometimes they help lead to breakthrough performances
7. A mob is a hyper-mimetic organism in which individual members can easily lose personal agency. Mimetic contagion destroys the distinctions between people — especially the differences in their desires.
8. You can show up to a rally wanting one thing and leave wanting something else entirely.
9. Crowd psychology is different than individual psychology
10. The guiltier he is, the more convincingly he can stand in for all other guilty parties and be sacrificed in their stead
11. The scapegoating mechanism does not hinge on the guilt or innocence of the scapegoat. It hinges on the ability of a community to use a scapegoat to accomplish their desired outcome: unification, healing, purgation, expiation. The scapegoat serves a religious function.

The Path of Least Resistance

1. In real life, scapegoats are usually singled out due to some combination of the following: they have extreme personalities or neurodiversity (such as autism) or physical abnormalities that make them noticeable; they’re on the margins of society in terms of status or markets (they are outside the system, like the Amish or people who have chosen to live off the grid); they’re considered deviants in some way (their behavior falls outside societal norms, whether related to lifestyle, sexuality, or style of communication); they’re unable to fight back (this applies even to rulers or kings — when it is all against one, even the most powerful person is impotent); or they appear as if by magic without society knowing where they came from or how they got there, which makes them easy to blame as the cause of social unrest (climate change activist Greta Thunberg’s arrival in New York to speak at the United Nations on a zero-carbon yacht marks her as a potential scapegoat)
2. All scapegoats have the power to unite people and defuse mimetic conflict. A scapegoat doesn’t have traditional power; a scapegoat has unifying power. A prisoner on death row possesses power that not even the state governor has. For a family or community in crisis, it can seem like only the death of that prisoner will bring them the kind of healing they seek. The prisoner, then, possesses a quasi-supernatural quality that no one else can stand in for. Only he can heal.
3. Most scapegoats are only kings or beggars

The Dancing Mania of 1518

1. Tarantism was a religious ritual that had the effect of restoring order from social chaos. The spiders were scapegoated.

Safety in Judgment

1. Scapegoats are chosen through a mimetic process of judgment, not a rational one
2. It is always easier to desire something — even, and maybe even especially, violence — when it has been desired by someone else first.
3. The first stone thrower shows the way. The second reinforces the desire. Now the third person in the crowd is hit with the mimetic force of two mimetic models. They cast the third stone and become the third model. The fourth, fifth, and sixth stones are cast with relative ease compared to the first three. The seventh is effortless. Mimetic contagion has taken hold The stone throwers become unattached from any form of objective judgment because their desire for a scapegoat has overpowered their desire for truth.

1. Anger metastasizes and spreads easily.
2. In a research done on Weibo, a popular social media app in China, it was found that anger spreads faster than other emotions, such as joy, because anger spreads easily when there are weak ties between people , as there often are online.

The Joy of Hate Watching

1. There is probably no more effective thing that a politician — or potential politician — can do to gain popular support than resolving a mimetic crisis. Such a person mimics the role of the High Priest in ancient Israel.
2. Eventually, societies began ritually reenacting the process that led to the scapegoat mechanism — creating disorder, allowing mimetic tension to reach a peak, then expelling or sacrificing something symbolic. (This is the formula of reality television today.) They found that catharsis flowed to everyone.
3. Substitute sacrifices permeate our culture. They have seeped into sports, organizational life, universities, and literature.

1. Ritual sacrifices do not literally bring divine blessing on a harvest; they can, however, resolve mimetic tension between humans competing for scarce resources.
2. The Hunger Games series is a contemporary twist on ancient Rome’s “bread and circuses.” The Romans knew they needed to give the Roman people bread — food to eat — in order to placate them. But they also had to provide circuses, or entertainment. The ritual sacrifice of gladiators or animals protected Rome from its own violence, preventing violent uprisings and keeping its leaders safe.

The Scapegoat Wins

1. It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed — Caiaphas, crucifix of Jesus
2. A scapegoat remains effective as long as we believe in its guilt
3. Having a scapegoat means not knowing that we have one
4. In making his recommendation, Caiaphas was being utterly practical. He was recommending a ritual sacrifice (crucifixion) to achieve a specific outcome (increased unity and peace).
5. We didn’t stop burning witches because we invented science; we invented science because we stopped burning witches. We used to blame droughts on witches; once we stopped blaming witches, we looked for scientific explanations for drought — Girard
6. Humanity still tends to revert to a primitive, sacrificial mindset that characterized our ancestors and kept them stuck in cycles of violence. From the perspective of the crowd, the scapegoat mechanism is entirely rational. So when the scapegoats become the sacred center around which a culture turns — when myth and superstition reemerge as dominant forces in a culture — actual rationality takes a back seat.
7. The Tenth Commandment forbids rivalrous desires. It prohibits them because they lead, as we’ve seen by now, to violence.

Self-Awareness, Self-Hatred

1. The development of human rights as we know it was born partly from the indirect acknowledgment that anyone can become a scapegoat under the right circumstances.
2. The original scapegoat mechanism brought order out of chaos — but the order depended on violence. The reverse process brings chaos out of order. The chaos is meant to shake up the “orderly” system, predicated on violence, until something serious is done to change it.

Part II: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DESIRE

1. Being anti-mimetic is having the ability, the freedom, to counteract destructive forces of desire.
2. Something mimetic is an accelerant; something anti-mimetic is a decelerant. An anti-mimetic action — or person — is a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

Chapter 5: ANTI-MIMETIC

Moving Goalposts

1. We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems — James Clear
2. From the standpoint of desire, our goals are the product of our systems. We can’t want something that is outside the system of desire we occupy.
3. People pursue the goals that are on offer to them in their system of desire. Goals are often chosen for us, by models. And that means the goalposts are always moving.
4. Some trends in goal setting: don’t make goals vague, grandiose, or trivial; make sure they’re SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, relevant, and time-based); make them FAST (another acronym: frequent, ambitious, specific, and transparent); have good OKRs (objectives and key results); put them in writing; share them with others for accountability.
5. Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals.

Mimetic Systems

1. The U.S. education system, the venture capital industry, the publish or perish racket for academics, and social media are examples of mimetic systems: mimetic desire sustains them.
2. Traditional venture capital (VC) funds operate in a mimetic system. They need extraordinary returns on their investments to justify the risks they take. Many only fund companies that have the potential to return ten times the value of their investment within five to seven years. Because of their investment timeline, VCs favor technology companies that can scale quickly — not food service companies that might grow steadily but only incrementally over twenty or thirty years. They’re looking for instant ramen, not risotto.
3. The VC demand for quick-hitting investments increases the attractiveness of tech start-ups to entrepreneurs. A mimetic system takes shape. It is driven not only by economic incentives and financial returns — which no doubt factor in — but also the prestige and validation that come with being financed by the right VC. They award Michelin stars in the form of investment checks. And for VCs: the benefits of having invested in sexy companies and headline-grabbing CEOs.
4. Social media platforms thrive on mimesis. Twitter encourages and measures imitation by showing how many times each post has been retweeted. People are more likely to use Facebook the more they are engaged with mimetic models, rivals whose posts they can track and comment on.
5. The greater the mimetic forces on a social media platform, the more people want to use it. If social media companies were to build in more friction or braking mechanisms for mimetic behavior, they would decrease user engagement and ultimately revenue; they have strong financial incentives to accelerate mimetic behavior. If two people argue on a social media platform, drawing others into the feud, it’s not hard to see who wins: the platform.
6. Systems of desire, both positive and negative, are everywhere. Prisons, monasteries, families, schools, and friend groups operate as systems of desire. And when a strong mimetic system is in place, it remains in place until it’s disrupted by a stronger one

Tactic 8: MAP OUT THE SYSTEMS OF DESIRE IN YOUR WORLD

1. Every industry, every school, every family has a particular system of desire that makes certain things more or less desirable. Know which systems of desire you’re living in. There’s probably more than one.
2. Entrepreneur and VC Marc Andreessen, in an April 2020 post on his company’s website titled “It’s Time to Build,” wonders how so many Western countries were unprepared — from a production standpoint — for the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. At one point, there were serious shortages of ventilators, test kits, cotton swabs, even hospital gowns. The complacency and malaise seemed to extend to many other domains, even before the pandemic — to education, manufacturing, transportation. The problem is not capital or competence or even a lack of awareness of what’s needed. “The problem is desire,” Andreessen wrote. “We need to ‘want’ these things.” But he acknowledges that there are forces in place that prevent us from wanting to build the things we need: regulatory capture, industry incumbents, stalemate politics. “The problem is inertia,” he continued. “We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things.”
3. Crippled systems of desire, unable to adapt, have made it so that we gravitate toward the path of least resistance — monetizing YouTube videos of people reacting to other YouTube videos, for instance — and lack the will to build the essential tools needed for human survival and flourishing.
4. Make visible what is invisible. Mark the boundaries of your current world of wanting, and you’ll gain the ability — at least the possibility — to transcend it.

The Tra-La-La and the Chichi

1. The Michelin Guide is an intermediary, a mediator of desire, from which thousands of chefs seek an imprimatur. Since 1900, when the first Michelin Guide was published, the Michelin brothers have been turning a flywheel of desire.
2. Michelin employed mimetic marketing. If the company could position itself as a model of desire in regard to which restaurants one should want to go to, Michelin would go from being a company that sells tires to a company that sells desire. They would go from being Compaq to Apple.

Modeling a New Mindset

1. Ressentiment, in French, implies that one’s values or worldview become deeply deformed through resentment

Chapter 6: DISRUPTIVE EMPATHY

Breaking Through Thin Desires

1. A negative mimetic cycle is disrupted when two people, through empathy, stop seeing each other as rivals
2. We can imitate a management strategy, or we can imitate empathy. The first is a framework; the second is a process.

The Problem with Sympathy

1. Sympathy: Our emotions fuse with those of the person we sympathize with. We see things from their perspective. A certain degree of agreement is implied.
2. Sympathy can be easily hijacked by mimesis
3. Empathy is the ability to share in another person’s experience — but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost. In this sense, empathy is anti-mimetic.
4. Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis.
5. A person who is able to empathize can enter into the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires.
6. An empathetic person has the ability to understand why someone might want something that they don’t want for themselves. In short, empathy allows us to connect deeply with other people without becoming like other people
7. Recall that in a mimetic crisis, everyone starts to become like everyone else. They lose self-possession and freedom.

Thick Desires

1. Discovering and developing thick desires protects against cheap mimetic desires — and ultimately leads to a more fulfilling life.
2. Thin desires are highly mimetic, contagious, and often shallow.
3. Desires feel very strong when we’re young — to make a lot of money, date a person with certain physical attributes, or become famous. The feelings are often more intense the thinner a desire is.
4. Most people do learn to cultivate thicker desires as they age.

Shaking the Dust

1. Envy is an engine of destructive mimetic desire, and there are few things to stop it because it operates underground. Prestige is measured relative to what we perceive someone else has that we lack, so it’s a breeding ground for envy.
2. The imitation happens because people want a certain amount of status and respect from others. By imitating those who already seem to have it, the imitators hope that some kind of transformation will take place.

Fulfillment Stories

1. Spirituality is simply what happens when we open ourselves to something greater than ourselves. It could be described as a sense of connectedness to self and to others and to the universe. — Rabbi Jonathan Sacks
2. Desire is social. Desire is connectedness.
3. What it means to be human: we are not entirely our own, but exist in a web of relationships connected by desire.
4. A Fulfillment Story, has three essential elements:
5. It’s an action
6. You believe you did well: You did it with excellence, you did it well — by your own estimation, and nobody else’s. You are looking for an achievement that matters to you.
7. It brought you a sense of fulfillment.
8. Actions follow being — Aristotle

Motivational Patterns

1. Each person possesses a mix of core motivational drives. The key is learning how they work together and how some of them come into play more than others in certain situations.
2. Great leaders start and sustain positive cycles of desire. They empathize with others’ weaknesses; they want to know and be known by others, at all levels of an organization; they focus on cultivating thick desires. They transcend the destructive mimetic cycle, which opens up a new world of possibilities: the world beyond our immediate wanting.

Chapter 7: TRANSCENDENT LEADERSHIP

How Great Leaders Inspire and Shape Desire

1. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
2. Pusillanimous, small-spirited leaders are driven by immanent desire — desire that is self-referential, circular, internal to the system it originates in because all models are internal mediators. It leads to rivalry and conflict.
3. Magnanimous, great-spirited leaders are driven by transcendent desire — desire that leads outward, beyond the existing paradigm, because the models are external mediators of desire. These leaders expand everyone’s universe of desire and help them explore it.

Immanent Desire

These are systems of immanent desire, in which there is no model outside the system — all the models are inside. (We could also call this systemic desire — that is, desire that is system-immanent.)

Transcendent Desire

1. Transcendent leadership does not limit itself to the immediate layer of reality but pushes beyond it to find something more meaningful.

Skill 1: Shift Gravity

1. Transcendent leaders don’t insist on the primacy of their own desires. They don’t make them the center around which everyone and everything must revolve. Instead, they shift the center of gravity away from themselves and toward a transcendent goal, so that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with others.

Skill 2: The Speed of Truth

1. The health of an organization is directly proportional to the speed at which truth travels within it. Real truth is anti-mimetic by its very nature — it doesn’t change depending on how mimetically popular or unpopular it is.
2. The quick and easy diffusion of truth combats destructive mimesis and rivalry. Mimesis bends, disguises, and distorts the truth. When the truth moves slowly in an organization — or when it is constantly bent to the will of certain people — mimesis dominates
3. In times of crisis, the threat from inside a company is underestimated. People who don’t want to take responsibility find scapegoats. Blame is assigned. Meanwhile, the threat from the outside grows deadlier.
4. If truth is not confronted courageously, communicated effectively, and acted upon quickly, a company will never be able to adhere to reality and respond appropriately to it. The health of any human project that relies on the ability to adapt depends on the speed at which truth travels. That holds for a classroom, a family, and a country.
5. Companies must adapt in order to survive. If truth is distorted, withheld, or slowed, companies can’t adapt fast enough to changing circumstances.
6. If you think of a company in evolutionary terms, only those with the fastest speed of truth are going to mutate fast enough to survive.
7. Rationality is critical to human flourishing, but our belief in its power has been greatly denigrated
8. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who died in 1900, did more than anyone else in the past two hundred years to contribute to our devaluation of the intellect. He emphasized the power of the will and relegated the intellect to the realm of perspective and interpretation.
9. In classical philosophy — at least the Aristotelian tradition — the will and the intellect are not opposed to each other but work in conjunction. The intellect informs the will and helps direct actions; actions then influence the intellect’s ability to grasp the truth
10. If you come to embrace the reality of mimetic desire, you will have the ability to think intentionally about what actions you can take to counteract negative mimesis in your life, and by doing that, you will know something experiential about mimetic desire that goes far beyond anything this book can offer.
11. The passionate pursuit of truth is anti-mimetic because it strives to reach objective values, not mimetic values. Leaders who embrace and model the pursuit of truth — and who increase its speed within the organization — inoculate themselves from some of the more volatile movements of mimesis that masquerade as truth.

Skill 3: Discernment

1. The pursuit of truth is an important anti-mimetic tactic, but it has limitations.
2. Desires are discerned, not decided. Discernment exists in the liminal space between what’s now and what’s next. Transcendent leaders create that space in their own lives, and in the lives of the people around them.

Skill 4: Sit Quietly in a Room

1. All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone — Blaise Pascal

Skill 5: Filter Feedback

1. Lean Startup Methodology: build things incrementally and take account of constant feedback along the way to validate and tweak what you’re doing.
2. The Lean Startup technique is a model of entrepreneurship fundamentally based on immanent desire. It’s politics by polling, in which a candidate does whatever the polls tell them to do. This is not leading, but following. Sometimes it’s plain cowardice.
3. Columnist Sam Walker thinks Musk is a dinosaur in the tech age. In his view, things have changed since Steve Jobs launched the iPhone. We have better analytics, more data, the world’s information at our fingertips.
4. When computers can sift through millions of pieces of data, market research wins the day.
5. Big Data is the place where the entrepreneurial spirit goes to die.
6. An economics which seeks to grapple with the real-world circumstance of open-endedness must transcend an analytical framework which cannot accommodate genuine surprise — Israel Kirzner
7. Definition of an entrepreneur is simple: One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it.

Chapter 8: THE MIMETIC FUTURE

What We Will Want Tomorrow

1. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created — Ray Kurzweil
2. Uncanny valley: A term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Mori discovered that people find robots more aesthetically appealing the more they physically resemble humans, but only up to a certain point. Once a robot appears too similar to a human, like figures in a wax museum, they become creepy, unsettling, repulsive.
3. The uncanny valley of sex robots fits with mimetic theory: it is not difference, but sameness, that terrifies us.
4. No similarity is more dangerous than the similarity of desire. We are uncomfortable when robots have too many similarities to the human form — so imagine if their similarities encroached on our desires.
5. When desires converge on the same object, conflict is inevitable. The real danger of AI is not robots that might one day be smarter than us but that might want the same things that we want: our job, our spouse, our dreams.
6. The real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?,’ but ‘What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought. — Yuval Harari
7. The question “What do we want to want?” is unsettling partly because, in a world of engineered desires, we have to wonder who is doing the engineering. But also because the question implies that it’s possible to want to want something, yet not be capable of wanting it.
8. We cannot want what we lack a model for. The model that we adopt for the future is critical to the formation of our desires.
9. What we’ll want in the future depends on three things: how desire was formed in the past, how it is formed in the present, and how it will be formed in the future.

Cultural Quicksand

1. Facebook is more than just a passive way of updating friends; it’s a tool for forging identities, real and desired. It provides an endless stream of models in the form of other people’s curated lives. That is the source of its seductive hold on us, as well as our ambivalent feelings about it. Facebook symbolizes the world’s entry into Freshmanistan, in which we spend most of our time looking down at our screens — which means simultaneously looking sideways at our neighbors.
2. Problems: There has been little improvement in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which affect nearly a third of all Americans over the age of eighty-five. There is still no cure for cancer. Life expectancy is declining in many parts of the world. So is quality of life. The Concorde made its last flight in 2003. Trains, planes, and automobiles move about as fast today as they did fifty years ago. Inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated for most Americans since the early 1960s — while the absolute size of paychecks has grown, purchasing power has not.
3. Gresham’s law: an economic principle specifying that bad money drives out good.
4. Google is like a deity that answers our questions (read: prayers); Facebook satisfies our need for love and belonging; Amazon fulfills the need for security, allowing us instantaneous access to goods in abundance (the company was there for us during COVID-19) to ensure our survival; and Apple appeals to our sex drive and the associated need for status, signaling one’s attractiveness as a mate by associating with a brand that is innovative, forward-thinking, and costly to own. In many ways, the Big Four tech companies are serving people’s needs better than churches do. — Scott Galloway
5. They’re addressing desires better, too. The vast majority of people are not thinking about mere survival; they are trying to figure out what to want next and how they can get it. The Big Four tech companies supply answers to both.
6. Google Is God, Facebook Is Love and Uber Is ‘Frat Rock’. “Google is God. I think it’s replaced God for us. As societies become more wealthy, more educated, religious institutions tend to play a smaller role in their lives, yet our modern-day anxieties and questions grow. There’s an enormous spiritual void for a divine intervention.… One in five queries posed to Google have never been asked before in the history of humankind. Think of a cleric, a rabbi, a priest, a teacher, a coach that has so much credibility that one in five questions posed to that individual have never been asked before.”
7. “It’s not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope” — Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
8. We’re mired in economic stagnation, political stalemates, and cultural exhaustion.
9. Decadence: moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury.
10. We lack a transcendent reference point outside the system. Meanwhile, everyone is more or less imitating everyone else. Our culture is stuck because we’re fighting over space in a pool, next to the ocean. Yet nobody dares to talk openly about it, this mimesis. It’s the hidden force driving our cultural development, and yet it’s taboo to speak about, like envy.
11. What would happen in a society that was increasingly liberal and individualistic, with a high degree of equality, but in which differences between people were noticeable? It would run the risk of having an even greater degree of enmity between people than a society with less equality. “When all conditions are unequal, there is no equality great enough to offend the eye,” Tocqueville wrote, “whereas the smallest dissimilarity appears shocking in the midst of general uniformity; the sight of it becomes more intolerable as uniformity is more complete. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
12. While we fight for equality in the areas that do matter — for fundamental human and civil rights, or for the freedom for each person to pursue their thick desires (in the United States, this is called the “the pursuit of happiness”) — we also begin fighting for equality in areas that do not matter, our thin desires: to make as much money as someone else, to have the same number of Instagram followers, to have the same amount of status or respect or professional prestige as any one of the nearly eight billion models on the planet.

1. The fight for things that do matter intersects and interacts with the fight for things that don’t matter because mimetic desire has the effect of blurring the lines. It turns our attention away from thick desires and onto thin ones. When the desire for equality is hijacked by mimetic desire, the only things we see are imaginary or superficial differences (These imaginary differences will be products of our misrecognition, from the reality distortion that mimetic desire causes. Misrecognition is what causes groups to mistakenly see scapegoats as grotesque and dangerous)
2. We find ourselves in a cycle of destructive desire. But that, in itself, is not deadly. It’s deadly because people don’t seem to think there’s any alternative. Our society is decadent and stagnant because it lacks hope. Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible. The fourth point is critical. Without the conviction that the fulfillment of a desire is possible, there is no hope — and therefore no desire. Hope is the soil in which thick desires grow. For lack of vision the people perish.

Instruments Versus Relationships

1. There are two approaches that people commonly take to escape from Cycle 1.
2. The first approach, engineering desire, is the approach of Silicon Valley, authoritarian governments, and the Cult of Experts. The first two use intelligence and data to centrally plan a system in which people want things that other people want them to want — things that benefit a certain group of people. This approach poses a serious threat to human agency. It also lacks respect for the capability of people to freely desire what is best for themselves and the people they love. The Cult of Experts, with their “Follow These Five Steps” approach to happiness, lacks respect for human complexity
3. The engineering approach is like extractive industrial farming, which uses pesticides and tills the land with large machinery, then measures success by seasonal yield, shelf life, and uniformity. The transformation approach is like regenerative farming, which can transform a barren piece of land into rich soil according to the laws and dynamics of the ecosystem. In our case, the ecosystem is one of human ecology — and desire is its lifeblood.
4. Transforming desire happens through relationships. Engineering desire happens in labs, with cold, lifeless instruments.

Engineering Desire

1. Technology companies have the power to engineer desire because they increasingly stand as mediators between people and the things they want. That is the definition of a mimetic model.
2. Amazon mediates desire for things. Google mediates desire for information itself
3. Companies that operate according to Surveillance Capitalism (coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff) translate private human experience into behavioral data that can then be used to engineer their desires, or atleast to exploit them for profit.
4. Surveillance Capitalism: A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales
5. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification
6. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history
7. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy
8. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth
9. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy.
10. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty
11. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above: an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty
12. Google’s path to riches is that with enough data and enough processors it can know better than we do what will satisfy our longings — George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

CENTRALLY PLANNED WANTING

1. Authoritarian regimes can only stay in existence so long as they can control what people want. We normally think of these regimes as controlling what people can and cannot do through laws, regulations, policing, and penalties. But their real victory comes not when they have authority over people’s actions; rather, their victory comes when they have authority over their desires. They don’t want to keep prisoners in cells; they want those prisoners to learn to love their cells. When there is no desire for change, their authority is complete.
2. It’s a sign of maturity to be able to hold on to two conflicting desires or two opposing ideas at the same time without immediately rejecting one or the other, before there has been time for a careful discernment. To live with desire is to live with tension.
3. The coexistence of opposites is often a sign, pointing us in the right direction.

AN EASY WAY OUT

Transforming Desire

1. There are two different ways of thinking that correspond, respectively, to engineering desire and transforming it: calculating thought and meditative thought
2. Calculating thought is constantly searching, seeking, plotting how to reach an objective: to get from Point A to Point B, to beat the stock market, to get good grades, to win an argument
3. Engineering a culture is engineering a religion
4. Some things are meant to be engineered (motorcycles) and other things are not (human nature).
5. The calculating mindset allows the scapegoat mechanism to thrive.
6. Meditative thought is simply slow, nonproductive thought. It’s not reactionary. It’s the kind of thought that, upon hearing news or experiencing something surprising, doesn’t immediately look for solutions.
7. Meditative thought is also essential to the process of discerning desires.
8. The calculating brain is only able to fit new experiences into existing mental models. The meditative brain develops new models. If we spend all of our time in calculating mode, we spend our lives trying to fit every new encounter into boxes. And when it comes to desire, that’s deadly.

THE IMAGINATION

1. We can only dream using the inputs we’ve received.
2. Fluency in a new language, a sense of humor, emotional intelligence, and aesthetic sensibility are all things we probably know tacitly but cannot articulate fully. So is a vibrant imagination, which is filled with models of desire at a young age.
3. Our desires are only as big or as small as the models that we are exposed to.
4. Education has shifted away from the liberal arts and toward increasingly specialized, technical knowledge — calculating thought
5. Sometimes the market isn’t a good indication of what people want. It’s good at price discovery for thin desires, but not necessarily for thick ones.

The Three Inventions

THE FIRST INVENTION

1. The scapegoat mechanism prevented a society in crisis from destroying itself from within. It worked in a paradoxical way: the scapegoat mechanism contained violence through violence. Instead of a war of all against all, there was a war of all against one. In spite of its injustices, Girard recognized that the scapegoat mechanism had a stabilizing effect in early societies.

THE SECOND INVENTION

1. As the scapegoat mechanism has lost its effectiveness, the modern market economy has arisen to take its place
2. Economic competition is less bloody than the sacrificial world that it supplanted

THE THIRD INVENTION

1. The scapegoat mechanism was the first major social invention to address the problem of desire. The market economy was the second. Neither will be able to protect us from mimetic escalation and crises in the future.
2. Humans could create a technological superstructure that plays the same role that archaic religions played in scapegoating: diffusing violence — through billions of bits and bytes — into the ether. It might be an invention that brings about an evolution in money, which makes it easier to measure and reward value creation at the individual level. It might be an invention that accelerates space exploration and colonization so that humans have entirely new parts of the cosmos to explore and therefore will be less focused on destroying each other. Or it might be an invention in education that makes it easier for each person to carve out their own track.

Single Greatest Desire

1. Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want — Naval Ravikant
2. Mimetic desire manifests itself as the constant yearning to be someone or something else (what we called metaphysical desire).

I was stunned at the behaviour of BMW Bird Automotive workshop, especially their workshop head, Mr. Shariq Zubair, wherein they created a repair estimation bill of almost 35 lakhs, and once Reliance General Insurance declared it as a total loss case, I was asked to pay 5% of 35 lakhs (1.75 lakhs) + Rs 1000/day as parking charges till the time car was parked at their compound. It almost took 120 days for the full payment by insurance, so it would have come around 1.2 lakhs more as parking charges, totalling 2.95 lakhs.

I immediately sent a complaint to BMW India about such charges, expecting a positive response. No response came through for 2 days, and Mr. Shariq got aggressive, telling me that because of this complaint, I’ll have to pay up the full amount, and there’s no room for negotiation. I asked around, and people told me luxury car dealerships usually charge 50000–60000 only for such cases.

Hence, I opened a new channel of communication with him, on more reasonable lines, and it was finally negotiated to be settled at 1.5 lakhs, of which 50000 was to be immediately paid, and the rest can be paid in two installments.

Even Reliance General Insurance had this weird policy wherein they first find a buyer who’ll buy the accidental car, pay the salvage amount, and then after a week, they’ll process the rest of the amount. I asked them why not just take the car, pay in full, and keep finding the buyer in their own time, they said it was a company policy.

Even more shocking behaviour came after 1.5 months, where I was again asked to pay the entire amount of remaining 1 lakh, even though there was not even a single penny paid in insurance. I was then asked by insurance surveryor to cancel the RC of the vehicle as there was no buyer willing to take the car with RC. For this, I needed “chassis number” cut out from the car, and only workshop could provide that. I approached the workshop, where Mr. Shariq told me to pay the amount in full, only then they will give it to me. In good faith, I had to pay the entire amount, and proceeded to cancel the RC.

It took full 45 days after RC Cancellation to get the insurance payment, while Mr. Shariq had told me that insurance will pay the amount after 3–4 days of scrapping the vehicle. All this has been such a disheartening experience by such an aspirational luxury brand like BMW.

While I am grateful that BMW cars are so safe that it saved my life from a life-threatening accident, and the car in itself was fun to drive, dealing with the workshop is where all the experience got ruined. It is incidents like these that shall dissuade people from ever buying and enjoying luxury cars in India. Imagine paying double the cost for a luxury car as compared to other nations, extremely high service/parts and maintenance costs, and then being hit with a punch like this at the end of it’s lifecycle. Buying a luxury car should be a reward for your hard work, and not a punishment to be inflicted on the buyer. I hope BMW India takes a note of this and avoids diluting their brand because of such dealerships looting customers.

1. Money is the central information utility of the world economy. As a medium of exchange, store of value, and unit of account, money is the critical vessel of information about the conditions of markets around the globe in both time and space.
2. Wealth is knowledge and growth is learning, and that both are governed by the rigorous science of information. The denizens of the Stone Age commanded all the material resources we have today. The difference between our age and the Stone Age is the expansion of knowledge. Knowledge expands through testable learning, “learning curves,” proceeding through entrepreneurial experiments.
3. Growth in wealth stems not from an efflorescence of self interest or greed, but from the progress of learning. It is accomplished by entrepreneurs conducting falsifiable experiments of enterprise, with the outcomes measurable by reliable money.
4. All information is most essentially surprise. An orderly and predictable mechanism, such as a determinist physics or Adam Smith’s economy as a “great machine,” embodies or generates no new information. Without surprises, time is low value and boring. Entropic surprises are what lend energy and directionality to time and economies.
5. In economics, money is part of the conduit or carrier. If money is to foster learning and knowledge, it cannot itself be surprising. Part of the channel for capitalist activity rather than part of the content, money must be the measure rather than what is measured. It is the fixed medium rather than a flexible message, a stable matrix for the market rather than an active marketable item.
6. The economy is not chiefly an incentive system, but an information system. It requires a reliable standard of value rooted in the irreversibility of time.
7. Creativity always comes as a surprise. If it didn’t, socialism would work. Information is defined as surprise.
8. Information is the opposite of order. Capitalist economies are not equilibrium systems but dynamic domains of entrepreneurial experiment.
9. Money should be a standard of measure for the outcomes of entrepreneurial experiments.
10. Interference between the conduit and the contents of a communications system is called noise. Noise in the currency makes it impossible to differentiate the signal from the channel.
11. A volatile market shrinks the time horizons of the economy. Gyrating currencies and grasping governments are deadly to the commitments of long-term enterprise.
12. Analogous to entropy, profit or loss represents surprising or unexpected outcomes. Analogous to average temperature in thermodynamics, the real interest rate represents the average returns.
13. Velocity is not a constant. Therefore, the effective money supply is not controlled by the central bank but by the free decisions of individuals as they accumulate knowledge.
14. In entrepreneurial experiments, the governing constraint is the scarcity and irreversibility of time. With infinite time, anything is possible. Finite time imposes the necessity for choice and prioritization. Time is embodied in interest rates (the time value of money), in budgets, in contracts, and in accounts. In economics, time is chiefly represented by money. In the deepest sense, money is time.
15. As an economy grows, with ever more abundance deriving from ever more learning, only one resource grows relatively scarce in proportion. That resource is time. It is the most real and irreversible of all constituents of value.
16. Money offers an accurate measure of earnings and expenditures chiefly as it reflects these costs of time, gauged in two irreversible ledgers — physics and biology: the speed of light and the span of life. If it does not represent these fundamental scarcities of human life, our economics will diverge from reality and betray us.
17. Financial inequalities do not affect the underlying scarcities of time and attention, speed of light and span of life, playing out across the real economies of our days. Time is remorselessly egalitarian, distributed with rough equality to rich and poor alike. Registering the radical increase in equality around the globe is a massive flattening of comparative lifespans. The rich cannot hoard time or readily seize it from others. It forces collaboration with others.
18. Gold achieves irreversibility through its refractory chemistry (79 protons in the gold parade) and the time-based entropy of extraction. As master of the mint in 18th century England, Isaac Newton spent much of his time proving that gold could not be hacked, counterfeited, or reverse engineered from other elements. As Nick Gillespie of Reason magazine has observed, Newton was not an alchemist so much as an “anti-alchemist.” 37 Bitcoin and other digital currencies offer similar irreversibility through complex mathematics and software, based on a time-stamped public “block chain” of transactions. Modern-age Newtons make constant efforts to hack Bitcoin.
19. Gold and Bitcoin both exclude from the measuring stick the advance of physical capital or technology and even the learning curves of labor. If the measuring stick changes in response to economic progress, it cannot measure that progress. In order to bear creative changes, it must not change itself. In order to have a gauge that is exempt from the turmoil of markets, it must be rooted outside those markets. It must somehow cancel capital, technology, and learning.
20. When Bitcoin innovators Satoshi Nakamoto and Nick Szabo sought to invent new forms of money, they explicitly designed algorithms that nullified the effects of technological advance in computer technology. As Moore’s law improved the computer systems used to validate transactions and integrate them with the Bitcoin block chain, for example, the “proof of work” challenge in the algorithm becomes proportionately more difficult and the reward smaller.

Highlights

1. All the chemicals that make up a human body can be bought in a hardware store for $10.00
2. 59 elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus — account for 99.1 percent of what makes us.
3. The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas.
4. Skin and hair are made largely of the same stuff: keratin.
5. We don’t have any receptors for wetness. We have only thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you can’t generally tell whether it really is wet or just cold.
6. If you put all Earth’s microbes in one heap and all the other animal life in another, the microbe heap would be twenty-five times greater than the animal one.
7. Brain is 75 to 80 percent water, with the rest split mostly between fat and protein.
8. Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars.

1. HOW TO BUILD A HUMAN

1. All the chemicals that make up a human body can be bought in a hardware store for $10.00
2. 59 elements are needed to construct a human being. Six of these — carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus — account for 99.1 percent of what makes us, but much of the rest is a bit unexpected. Who would have thought that we would be incomplete without some molybdenum inside us, or vanadium, manganese, tin, and copper? Our requirements for some of these, it must be said, are surpassingly modest and are measured in parts per million or even parts per billion. We need, for instance, just 20 atoms of cobalt and 30 of chromium for every 999,999,999½ atoms of everything else.
3. The biggest component in any human, filling 61 percent of available space, is oxygen. It may seem a touch counterintuitive that we are almost two-thirds composed of an odorless gas. The reason we are not light and bouncy like a balloon is that the oxygen is mostly bound up with hydrogen (which accounts for another 10 percent of you) to make water — and water, as you will know if you have ever tried to move a wading pool or just walked around in really wet clothes, is surprisingly heavy. It is a little ironic that two of the lightest things in nature, oxygen and hydrogen, when combined form one of the heaviest, but that’s nature for you. Oxygen and hydrogen are also two of the cheaper elements within you. All your oxygen will set you back just $14 and your hydrogen a little over $26 (assuming you are about the size of Benedict Cumberbatch). Your nitrogen (2.6 percent of you) is a better value still at just forty cents for a body’s worth.
4. You need about thirty pounds of carbon, and that will cost you $69,550. Calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, though needed in much smaller amounts, would between them set you back a further $73,800. Thorium costs over $3,000 per gram but constitutes just 0.0000001 percent of you, so you can buy a body’s worth for thirty-three cents. All the tin you require can be yours for six cents, while zirconium and niobium will cost you just three cents apiece. The 0.000000007 percent of you that is samarium isn’t apparently worth charging for at all.
5. Cadmium is the twenty-third most common element in the body, constituting 0.1 percent of your bulk, but it is seriously toxic. We have it in us not because our body craves it but because it gets into plants from the soil and then into us when we eat the plants. If you are from North America, you probably ingest about eighty micrograms of cadmium a day, and no part of it does you any good at all.
6. Pluck almost any cell from your body, and it will have a million or more selenium atoms in it, yet until recently nobody had any idea what they were there for. We now know that selenium makes two vital enzymes, deficiency in which has been linked to hypertension, arthritis, anemia, some cancers, and even, possibly, reduced sperm counts. So, clearly it is a good idea to get some selenium inside you (it is found particularly in nuts, whole wheat bread, and fish), but at the same time if you take in too much you can irremediably poison your liver.
7. According to the RSC, the full cost of building a new human being, using the obliging Benedict Cumberbatch as a template, would be a very precise $151,578.46. Labor and sales tax would, of course, boost costs further. You would probably be lucky to get a take-home Benedict Cumberbatch for much under $300,000.
8. You blink fourteen thousand times a day — so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.
9. In the second or so since you started this sentence, your body has made a million red blood cells.
10. Altogether it takes 7 billion billion billion (that’s 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 7 octillion) atoms to make you.
11. Your lungs, smoothed out, would cover a tennis court, and the airways within them would stretch nearly from coast to coast.
12. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around Earth. The most remarkable part of all is your DNA (or deoxyribonucleic acid). You have a meter of it packed into every cell, and so many cells that if you formed all the DNA in your body into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, to beyond Pluto. Think of it: there is enough of you to leave the solar system. You are in the most literal sense cosmic.
13. The heart of the cell is the nucleus. It contains the cell’s DNA — three feet of it. The reason so much DNA can fit into a cell nucleus is that it is exquisitely thin. You would need twenty billion strands of DNA laid side by side to make the width of the finest human hair. Every cell in your body (strictly speaking, every cell with a nucleus) holds two copies of your DNA. That’s why you have enough to stretch to Pluto and beyond.
14. DNA exists for just one purpose — to create more DNA. Your DNA is simply an instruction manual for making you. A length of DNA is divided into segments called chromosomes and shorter individual units called genes. The sum of all your genes is the genome.
15. DNA is extremely stable. It can last for tens of thousands of years.
16. DNA passes on information with extraordinary fidelity. It makes only about one error per every billion letters copied. Still, because your cells divide so much, that is about three errors, or mutations, per cell division. Most of those mutations the body can ignore, but just occasionally they have lasting significance. That is evolution.
17. What genes specifically do is provide instructions for building proteins. Most of the useful things in the body are proteins. Some speed up chemical changes and are known as enzymes. Others convey chemical messages and are known as hormones. Still others attack pathogens and are called antibodies. The largest of all our proteins is called titin, which helps to control muscle elasticity.
18. All humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA, and yet no two humans are alike. My DNA and your DNA will differ in three to four million places, which is a small proportion of the total but enough to make a lot of difference between us. You also have within you about a hundred personal mutations — stretches of genetic instructions that don’t quite match any of the genes given to you by either of your parents but are yours alone.
19. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, which is to say only 2 percent does anything demonstrably and unequivocally practical. Quite what the rest is doing isn’t known. A lot of it, it seems, is just there, like freckles on skin.
20. Suicide by lifestyle takes ages.
21. Five out of every six smokers won’t get lung cancer.
22. Every day, it has been estimated, between one and five of your cells turn cancerous, and your immune system captures and kills them. Think of that.
23. Our bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.

2 THE OUTSIDE: SKIN AND HAIR

1. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. — DOROTHY PARKER
2. The skin consists of an inner layer called the dermis and an outer epidermis. The outermost surface of the epidermis, called the stratum corneum, is made up entirely of dead cells. It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased. Where body meets air, we are all cadavers. These outer skin cells are replaced every month. We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces every hour.
3. Skin and hair are made largely of the same stuff: keratin.
4. Beneath the epidermis is the more fertile dermis, where reside all the skin’s active systems — blood and lymph vessels, nerve fibers, the roots of hair follicles, the glandular reservoirs of sweat and sebum. Beneath that, and not technically part of the skin, is a subcutaneous layer where fat is stored. Though it may not be part of the cutaneous system, it’s an important part of your body because it stores energy, provides insulation, and attaches the skin to the body beneath.
5. Sebum mixes with sweat to form oil on the skin surface. This helps to keep skin supple and to make it inhospitable for many foreign organisms. Sometimes the pores become blocked with little plugs of dead skin and dried sebum in what is known as a blackhead. If the follicle additionally becomes infected and inflamed, the result is the adolescent dread known as a pimple.
6. Meissner’s corpuscles are everyone’s favorites. They detect light touch and are particularly abundant in our erogenous zones and other areas of heightened sensitivity: fingertips, lips, tongue, clitoris, penis, and so on.
7. We don’t have any receptors for wetness. We have only thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you can’t generally tell whether it really is wet or just cold.
8. Women are much better than men at tactile sensitivity with fingers, but possibly just because they have smaller hands and thus a more dense network of sensors. An interesting thing about touch is that the brain doesn’t just tell you how something feels, but how it ought to feel. That’s why the caress of a lover feels wonderful, but the same touch by a stranger would feel creepy or horrible. It’s also why it is so hard to tickle yourself.
9. A sliver of a translucent, one millimeter thick skin is where all the skin color is. That’s all that race is — a sliver of epidermis.
10. “People act as if skin color is a determinant of character when all it is is a reaction to sunlight. Biologically, there is actually no such thing as race — nothing in terms of skin color, facial features, hair type, bone structure, or anything else that is a defining quality among peoples. And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the color of their skin.” — Nina Jablonski
11. Melanin’s production slows dramatically as we age, and as it colors our hair also, which is why older people’s hair tends to turn gray.
12. Melanin is a superb natural sunscreen. It is produced in cells called melanocytes. All of us, whatever our race, have the same number of melanocytes. The difference is in the amount of melanin produced. Melanin often responds to sunlight in a literally patchy way, resulting in freckles, which are technically known as ephelides.
13. light skin may be a consequence of human migration and the rise of agriculture. The argument is that hunter-gatherers got a lot of their vitamin D from fish and game and that these inputs fell sharply when people started growing crops, especially as they moved into northern latitudes. It therefore became a great advantage to have lighter skin, to synthesize extra vitamin D.
14. Vitamin D is vital to health. It helps to build strong bones and teeth, boosts the immune system, fights cancers, and nourishes the heart. It is thoroughly good stuff. We can get it in two ways — from the foods we eat or through sunlight. The problem is that too much UV exposure damages DNA in our cells and can cause skin cancer.
15. Humans have addressed the challenge by evolving a range of skin tones to suit sunshine intensity at different latitudes. When a human body adapts to altered circumstances, the process is known as phenotypic plasticity. We alter our skin color all the time — when we tan or burn beneath a bright sun or blush from embarrassment. The red of sunburn is because the tiny blood vessels in the affected areas become engorged with blood, making the skin hot to the touch. The formal name for sunburn is erythema.
16. Pregnant women frequently undergo a darkening of the nipples and areolae, and sometimes of other parts of the body such as the abdomen and face, as a result of increased production of melanin. The process is known as melasma.
17. To meet dietary requirements from food alone, you would have to eat fifteen eggs or six pounds of swiss cheese every day, or, more plausibly if not more palatably, swallow half a tablespoon of cod liver oil. In America, milk is helpfully supplemented with vitamin D, but that still provides only a third of daily adult requirements. In consequence, some 50 percent of people globally are estimated to be vitamin D deficient for at least part of the year. In northern climes, it may be as much as 90 percent.
18. Hair and eye color don’t affect vitamin D metabolism.
19. If you have blue or green eyes, it’s not because you have more of those colors in your irises than other people but because you simply have less of other colors.
20. Hairless skin is called glabrous, and there isn’t much of it. Our only truly hairless parts are lips, nipples and genitalia, and the bottoms of our hands and feet.
21. The rest of the body is covered with either conspicuous hair, called terminal hair, as on your head, or vellus hair, which is the downy stuff you find on a child’s cheek.
22. Horripilation (Goose Bumps): The erection of hairs on the skin due to cold, fear, or excitement
23. Hair on the head acts as a good insulator in cold weather and a good reflector of heat in hot weather.
24. For facial hair a cycle is normally completed in four weeks, but a scalp hair may be with you for as much as six or seven years. A hair in your armpit is likely to last about six months, a leg hair for two months. Hair grows by one third of a millimeter a day.
25. The textbook name for fingerprints is dermatoglyphics. The plow lines that make up our fingerprints are papillary ridges. They are assumed to aid in gripping, in the way tire treads improve traction on roads.
26. “It is plain old unglamorous sweat that has made humans what they are today.” — Nina Jablonski
27. Chimpanzees have only about half as many sweat glands as we have, and so can’t dissipate heat as quickly as humans can.
28. The loss of most of our body hair and the gain of the ability to dissipate excess body heat through eccrine sweating helped to make possible the dramatic enlargement of our most temperature-sensitive organ, the brain. Sweat helps to make you brainy.
29. Sweating is activated by the release of adrenaline, which is why when you are stressed, you break into a sweat.
30. It is eccrine sweat in your feet — or more correctly the chemical breakdown by bacteria of the sweat in your feet — that accounts for their lush odor. Sweat on its own is actually odorless. It needs bacteria to create a smell. The two chemicals that account for the odor — isovaleric acid and methanediol — are also produced by bacterial actions on some cheeses, which is why feet and cheese can often smell so very alike.
31. Your skin microbes are exceedingly personal. The microbes that live on you depend to a surprising degree on what soaps or laundry detergents you use, whether you favor cotton clothing or wool, whether you shower before work or after. Some of your microbes are permanent residents. Others camp out on you for a week or a month and then, like a wandering tribe, quietly vanish.
32. The problem with antibacterial soaps is that they kill good bacteria on your skin as well as bad.
33. Studies of scratching showed that the most prolonged relief comes from scratching the back but the most pleasurable relief comes from scratching the ankle.
34. About 60 percent of men are “substantially bald” by the age of fifty. One man in five achieves that condition by thirty.

3. MICROBIAL YOU

1. And we are not at the end of the penicillin story. Perhaps we are only just at the beginning. — ALEXANDER FLEMING
2. Eighty percent of the air you breathe is nitrogen.
3. Trillions and trillions of Microbes provide you with about 10 percent of your calories by breaking down foods that you couldn’t otherwise make use of, and in the process extract beneficial nutriments like vitamins B 2 and B 12 and folic acid. Humans produce twenty digestive enzymes, which is a pretty respectable number in the animal world, but bacteria produce ten thousand, or five hundred times as many, according to Christopher Gardner of Stanford University. “Our lives would be vastly less well nourished without them,”
4. E. coli can reproduce seventy-two times in a day, which means that in three days they can rack up as many new generations as we have managed in the whole of human history.
5. A single parent bacterium could in theory produce a mass of offspring greater than the weight of Earth in less than two days. In three days, its progeny would exceed the mass of the observable universe.
6. If you put all Earth’s microbes in one heap and all the other animal life in another, the microbe heap would be twenty-five times greater than the animal one.
7. This is a planet of microbes. We are here at their pleasure. They don’t need us at all. We’d be dead in a day without them.
8. you are likely to have something like 40,000 species of microbes calling you home — 900 in your nostrils, 800 more on your inside cheeks, 1,300 next door on your gums, as many as 36,000 in your gastrointestinal tract.
9. Thin people have more gut microbes than fat people; having hungry microbes may at least partly account for their thinness.
10. Altogether your private load of microbes weighs roughly three pounds, about the same as your brain.
11. Microbiota is considered as one of our organs.
12. Looked at genetically, you have about twenty thousand genes of your own within you, but perhaps as many as twenty million bacterial genes, so from that perspective you are roughly 99 percent bacterial and not quite 1 percent you.
13. Passionate kissing alone, according to one study, results in the transfer of up to one billion bacteria from one mouth to another, along with about 0.7 milligrams of protein, 0.45 milligrams of salt, 0.7 micrograms of fat, and 0.2 micrograms of “miscellaneous organic compounds” (that is, bits of food).
14. 1,415 tiny, mindless entities cause one-third of all deaths on the planet.
15. A virus is a piece of bad news wrapped up in a protein. — Peter Medawar
16. Most viruses infect only bacterial cells and have no effect on us at all. Of the hundreds of thousands of viruses reasonably supposed to exist, just 586 species are known to infect mammals, and of these only 263 affect humans.
17. Ocean viruses alone if laid end to end would stretch for ten million light-years. — Dorothy H. Crawford
18. Surprisingly, the least effective way to spread germs (according to yet another study) is kissing. It proved almost wholly ineffective among volunteers at the University of Wisconsin who had been successfully infected with cold virus. Sneezes and coughs weren’t much better. The only really reliable way to transfer cold germs is physically by touch.
19. The two other forms of microbe that commonly lurk within us are fungi and protists.
20. Fungi is of two types - Mold and yeast
21. All single-celled organisms were called protozoa. Plasmodium protists are the evil little creatures that transfer from mosquitoes into us and give us malaria.
22. The more we expose microbes to antibiotics, the more opportunity they have to develop resistance

4. THE BRAIN

1. The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side, The one the other will include With ease, and you beside. — EMILY DICKINSON
2. Brain is 75 to 80 percent water, with the rest split mostly between fat and protein.
3. Brain has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunshine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code.
4. Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years.
5. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimeter in size — about the size of a grain of sand — could hold two thousand terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included, or about 1.2 billion copies of this book.
6. The human brain is estimated to hold something on the order of two hundred exabytes of information, roughly equal to “the entire digital content of today’s world.
7. The brain is often depicted as a hungry organ. It makes up just 2 percent of our body weight but uses 20 percent of our energy.
8. In newborn infants, it’s no less than 65 percent. That’s partly why babies sleep all the time — their growing brains exhaust them — and have a lot of body fat, to use as an energy reserve when needed.
9. Your muscles actually use even more of your energy, about a quarter, but you have a lot of muscle; per unit of matter, the brain is by far the most expensive of our organs.
10. Your brain requires only about four hundred calories of energy a day — about the same as you get in a blueberry muffin.
11. Unlike other parts of the body, the brain burns its four hundred calories at a steady rate no matter what you are doing. Hard thinking doesn’t help you slim.
12. Richard Haier used positron emission tomography scanners to find that the hardest-working brains are usually the least productive. The most efficient brains, he found, were those that could solve a task quickly and then go into a kind of standby mode.
13. We use exactly the same components — neurons, axons, ganglia, and so on — as a dog or hamster. Whales and elephants have much larger brains than we have, though of course they also have much larger bodies. But even a mouse scaled up to the size of a human would have a brain just as big, and many birds would do even better.
14. Brain has 86 billion nerve cells, or neurons.
15. Other cells are compact and spherical. Neurons are long and stringy, the better to pass on electrical signals from one to another.
16. Each neuron connects with thousands of other neurons, giving trillions and trillions of connections — as many connections “ in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way,” to quote the neuroscientist David Eagleman.
17. To survive on Earth, you don’t need to be able to write music or engage in philosophy — you really only need to be able to outthink a quadruped — so why have we invested so much energy and risk in producing mental capacity that we don’t really need?
18. At the top, literally and figuratively, is the cerebrum, which fills most of the cranial vault and is the part that we normally think of when we think of “the brain.” The cerebrum (from the Latin word for “brain”) is the seat of all our higher functions. It is divided into two hemispheres.
19. Each hemisphere of the cerebrum is further divided into four lobes: frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal.
20. The parietal lobe manages sensory inputs like touch and temperature. The occipital lobe processes visual information, and the temporal lobe principally manages auditory information, though it also helps with processing visual information.
21. The frontal lobe is the seat of the higher functions of the brain — reasoning, forethought, problem solving, emotional control. It is the part responsible for personality.
22. Beneath the cerebrum, at the very back of the head about where it meets the nape of the neck, is the cerebellum (Latin for “little brain”). Although the cerebellum occupies just 10 percent of the cranial cavity, it has more than half the brain’s neurons. It has a lot of neurons not because it does a great deal of thinking but because it controls balance and complex movements, and that requires an abundance of wiring.
23. At the base of the brain, descending from it rather like an elevator shaft connecting the brain to the spine and the body beyond, is the oldest part of the brain, the brain stem. It is the home of our more basic operations: sleeping, breathing, keeping the heart going.
24. Scattered through the brain rather like nuts in a fruitcake are many smaller structures — hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus, telencephalon, septum pellucidum, habenular commissure, entorhinal cortex, and a dozen or so others — which are collectively known as the limbic system (from the Latin limbus, meaning “peripheral”).
25. People whose amygdalae are destroyed are left literally fearless, and often cannot even recognize fear in others. The amygdala grows particularly lively when we are asleep, and thus may account for why our dreams are so often disturbing. Your nightmares may simply be the amygdalae unburdening themselves.
26. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.
27. Human memory works like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it, and so can other people. — Elizabeth Loftus
28. Memories are categorized long-term, short-term, and working (for duration) and procedural, conceptual, semantic, declarative, implicit, autobiographical, and sensual (for type).
29. Memories come in two principal varieties: declarative and procedural. Declarative memory is the kind you can put into words — the names of state capitals, your date of birth, how to spell “ophthalmologist,” and everything else you know as fact. Procedural memory describes the things you know and understand but couldn’t so easily put into words — how to swim, drive a car, peel an orange, identify colors.
30. Working memory is where short-term and long-term memories combine. Say you are presented with a mathematical problem to solve. The problem resides in short-term memory — you won’t, after all, need to remember the problem months from now — but the skills necessary to make the computation are kept in long-term memory.
31. Recall memory, which is what you can remember spontaneously — the kinds of things you know when you do a general knowledge quiz — and recognition memory, which is where you are a bit hazy on the substance but can recall the context. Recognition memory is actually useful because it doesn’t clutter the brain with unnecessary details but does help us to remember where we can find those details if we should need them again.
32. Short-term memory is really short — no more than half a minute or so for things like addresses and phone numbers. (If you can still remember something after half a minute, it is no longer technically a short-term memory. It’s long term.) Most people’s short-term memory is pretty abysmal. Six random words or digits is about all that most of us can reliably retain for more than a few moments.
33. Hippocampus has a central role in laying down memories.
34. Higher processes — thinking, seeing, hearing, and so on — happen right at the surface, in the four-millimeter-thick sheath of the cerebral cortex.
35. The cerebral cortex, is the brain’s celebrated gray matter. Beneath it is the much greater volume of white matter, which is so called because the neurons are sheathed in a pale fatty insulator called myelin, which greatly accelerates the speed at which signals are transmitted. Both white matter and gray matter are misleadingly named. Gray matter isn’t terribly gray in life, but has a pinkish blush. It only becomes conspicuously gray in the absence of blood flow and with the addition of preservatives. White matter is also a posthumous attribute because the pickling process turns the myelin coatings on its nerve fibers a luminous white.
36. The idea that we use only 10 percent of our brains is a myth
37. A teenager’s brain is only about 80 percent finished. Although most of the growth of the brain occurs in the first two years and is 95 percent completed by the age of ten, the synapses aren’t fully wired until a young person is in his or her mid- to late twenties.
38. The nucleus accumbens, a region of the forebrain associated with pleasure, grows to its largest size in one’s teenage years. At the same time, the body produces more dopamine, the neurotransmitter that conveys pleasure, than it ever will again.
39. Everybody has heard of neurons, but not so many are familiar with the other main brain cells, glia or glial cells, which is a little odd because they outnumber neurons by ten to one. Glia (the word means “glue” or “putty”) are the cells that support neurons in the brain and central nervous system.
40. Once you pass early childhood, you have all the brain cells you are ever going to have.
41. The heart pumps, the lungs inflate and deflate, the intestines quietly ripple and gurgle, but the brain just sits pudding-like, giving away nothing.

12. THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

1. We have some three hundred different types of immune cells at work within us.
2. If you are stressed or exhausted, you are much more likely to suffer an infection
3. At the heart of the system are five types of white blood cells: lymphocytes, monocytes, basophils, neutrophils, and eosinophils.
4. Lymphocytes are of two principal types: B cells and T cells. B cells are produced in Bone Marrow, and T cells in Thyme organ
5. T cells are a kind of elite corps in the immune system.
6. T cells subdivide into two further categories: helper T cells and killer T cells. Helper T cells help other immune cells act, including helping B cells produce antibodies.
7. Memory T cells remember the details of earlier invaders and are therefore able to coordinate a swift response if the same pathogen shows up again — what is known as adaptive immunity.
8. Some infectious agents, like E. coli and salmonella, can trick the immune system into attacking the wrong organisms.
9. Inflammation is essentially the heat of battle as the body defends itself from damage. Blood vessels in the vicinity of an injury dilate, allowing more blood to flow to the site, bringing with it white blood cells to fight off invaders. That causes the site to swell, increasing the pressure on surrounding nerves, resulting in tenderness.
10. When WBCs encounter an invader, they fire off attack chemicals called cytokines, which is what makes you feel feverish and ill when your body is battling infection. It’s not the infection that makes you feel dreadful, but your body defending itself. The pus that seeps from a wound is simply dead white cells that have given their lives in defense of you.
11. Inflammation is a tricky thing. Too much and it destroys neighboring tissues and can result in unnecessary pain, but too little and it fails to stop infection. Faulty inflammation has been linked to all kinds of maladies, from diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease to heart attacks and strokes.
12. Sometimes the immune system gets so ramped up that it brings out all its defenses and fires all its missiles in what is known as a cytokine storm. That’s what kills you. Cytokine storms show up again and again in many pandemic diseases, but also in things like extreme allergic reactions to bee stings.
13. As of late 2018, 114,000 people were on transplant waiting lists in the United States. A new person joins the list every ten minutes, and twenty people a day die before a donated organ can be found. People on dialysis live an extra eight years on average, but that rises to twenty-three years with a transplant.
14. About a third of kidney transplants come from living donors (typically a close relative), but all other transplanted organs are from deceased donors, which is a real challenge.
15. The median waiting time today for a kidney transplant in the United States is 3.6 years, up from 2.9 years in 2004, but many people can’t wait that long. In the United States, seven thousand people a year on average die before they can receive a transplant.
16. Altogether humans are afflicted by some fifty types of autoimmune diseases, and the numbers are rising.
17. Women are twice as likely as men to get multiple sclerosis, ten times more likely to get lupus, fifty times more likely to suffer a thyroid condition known as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Altogether, 80 percent of all autoimmune diseases occur in women.
18. The richer the country, the more allergies its citizens get.
19. Hygiene hypothesis: The idea is that children in the developed world grow up in much cleaner environments than children of earlier ages did, and so don’t develop resistance to infection as well as those who have a more intimate contact with dirt and parasites.

14. FOOD, GLORIOUS FOOD

1. The calorie is a strange and complicated measure of food energy. Formally, it’s a kilocalorie, and it is defined as the amount of energy required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree centigrade.
2. We cannot make use of cellulose, which is what plants primarily consist of.
3. A cooked potato is about twenty times more digestible than a raw one.
4. Cooking frees up a lot of time for us. Other primates spend as many as seven hours a day just chewing. We don’t need to eat constantly to ensure our survival.
5. Too much or too little iron both provide the same symptom, lethargy. “Too much iron in the form of supplements can accumulate in our tissues causing our organs literally to rust,”
6. Potassium helps to keep your heart beating smoothly and your blood pressure within tolerable limits.

PROTEINS

1. PROTEINS ARE COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids.
2. A small but unspecified number of amino acids strung together is a peptide. Ten or twelve strung together is a polypeptide. When a polypeptide begins to get bigger than that, it becomes, at some ineffable point, a protein.

CARBOHYDRATES

1. CARBOHYDRATES ARE COMPOUNDS of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, which are bound together to form a variety of sugars — glucose, galactose, fructose, maltose, sucrose, deoxyribose (the stuff found in DNA), and so on. Some of these are chemically complex and known as polysaccharides, some are simple and known as monosaccharides, and some are in between and known as disaccharides. Although all are sugars, not all are sweet. Some, like the starches found in pasta and potatoes, are too big to activate the tongue’s sweet detectors
2. All carbohydrates in the diet come from plants, with one conspicuous exception: lactose, from milk.
3. A 150-gram serving of white rice or a small bowl of cornflakes will have the same effect on your blood glucose levels as nine teaspoons of sugar.

FATS

1. When fats are broken down in the body, they are teamed up with cholesterol and proteins in a new molecule called lipoproteins, which travel through the body via the bloodstream. Lipoproteins come in two principal types: high density and low density. Low-density lipoproteins are the ones frequently referred to as “bad cholesterol” because they tend to form plaque deposits on the walls of blood vessels.
2. About 7 percent of Cholestrol — floats about in the bloodstream. Of that 7 percent, one-third is “good” cholesterol and two-thirds is “bad.”
3. Fiber is the material in fruits, vegetables, and other plant foods that the body cannot fully break down. It contains no calories and no vitamins, but it helps to lower cholesterol and slows the rate at which sugar gets into the bloodstream and is then turned into fat by the liver, among many other benefits.
4. The body burns some of the fat we consume for energy, but a good deal of the rest is sent off to tens of billions of tiny storage terminals called adipocytes, which exist all over the body.
5. Depending on where the fat ends up, it is known as subcutaneous (beneath the skin) or visceral (around the belly). For complex chemical reasons, visceral fat is much worse for you than the subcutaneous kind.
6. Animal fats tend to be saturated and vegetable fats to be unsaturated
7. Also known as hydrogenated oils, trans fats are much worse for your heart than any other kind of fat. They raise levels of bad cholesterol, lower levels of good cholesterol, and damage the liver.
8. We consume about two and a half quarts of water a day.
9. Drinking too much water can actually be dangerous. Normally, your body manages fluid balance very well, but occasionally people take in so much water that the kidneys cannot get rid of it fast enough and they end up dangerously diluting the sodium levels in their blood, setting off a condition known as hyponatremia
10. Over a lifetime, we eat about sixty tons of food, which is equivalent, notes Carl Zimmer in Microcosm, to eating sixty small cars.
11. One chocolate chip cookie a week, in the absence of any offsetting extra exercise, will translate into about two pounds of extra weight a year.
12. The French eat more cheese and drink more wine than almost anybody else on Earth and yet have some of the lowest rates of heart disease
13. The official guidance in most countries is that fats should account for no more than 30 percent of a person’s daily diet, and saturated fats no more than 7 percent.
14. A forty-year-old man who eats a hamburger every day will knock a year off his life expectancy.
15. Sugar has 16 calories per teaspoon.
16. Three apples would give you just as much sugar but compensate by also giving you vitamins, minerals, and fiber, not to mention a greater feeling of satiation.
17. It is often written that eating a daily helping of processed meat increases your risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent, which is doubtless true. But as Julia Belluz of Vox has pointed out, “A person’s lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5 percent, and eating processed meat every day appears to boost a person’s absolute risk of cancer by 1 percentage point, to 6 percent (that’s 18 percent of the 5 percent lifetime risk).”

15. THE GUTS

1. Your alimentary canal is about forty feet long if you are an average-sized man. The surface area of all that tubing is about half an acre.
2. For a man, the average journey time from mouth to anus is fifty-five hours. For a woman, typically, it is more like seventy-two.
3. Each meal you eat spends about four to six hours in the stomach, a further six to eight hours in the small intestine, where all that is nutritious (or fattening) is stripped away and dispatched to the rest of the body to be used or, alas, stored, and up to three days in the colon, which is essentially a large fermentation tank where billions and billions of bacteria pick over whatever the rest of the intestines couldn’t manage — fiber mostly.
4. Many people have had their stomachs removed without serious consequence. The real digestion and absorption — the feeding of the body — happens further down.
5. The stomach of a big dog will hold up to twice as much food as yours does.
6. The rumblings of your gut, incidentally, come mostly from the large intestine, not the stomach. The technical term for gut rumblings is “borborygmi”
7. One thing the stomach does do is kill off many microbes, by soaking them in hydrochloric acid. “Without your stomach, a lot more of what you ate would make you ill,”
8. E. coli in your colon produces vitamin K for you.
9. Responsibility for food safety is split among a raft of federal agencies in America in a way that rather defies logic. The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for the skin of sausages, but the Food Safety and Inspection Service is responsible for what goes inside them
10. Most nausea-inducing microbes need time to proliferate inside you before they make you sick, mostly 24 hours.
11. “People tend to blame the last thing they ate, but it’s probably the thing before the last thing they ate”
12. The largest source of food-borne illness is not meat or eggs or mayonnaise, as commonly supposed, but green leafy vegetables. They account for one in five of all food illnesses.
13. Appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria.
14. The large intestine (also known as bowel/colon) is a kind of fermentation tank, home of feces, flatus, and all our microbial flora.
15. Adults in the West produce about 200 grams of feces a day — a little under half a pound, about 180 pounds a year, 14,000 pounds in a lifetime.
16. Stools consist in large part of dead bacteria, undigested fiber, sloughed-off intestinal cells, and the residues of dead red blood cells.
17. Every gram of feces you produce contains 40 billion bacteria and 100 million archaea.
18. Stool samples taken two days apart can give strikingly different results. Even samples taken from two ends of the same stool can seem to come from two different people
19. Nearly all cancer that occurs in the gut is found in the large intestine and almost never in the small intestine.
20. Mice get cancer in the small intestine but not in the colon. But if you give them a Western-style diet, that reverses. It is the same for Japanese people when they move to the West and adopt a Western lifestyle. They get less stomach cancer, but more colon cancer.
21. E. coli has become the most studied microbe on the planet. Carl Zimmer, has written a fascinating book, Microcosm, on this bacillus.
22. Two strains of E. coli have more genetic variability than all the mammals on Earth put together.
23. Flatus (farts) consists primarily of carbon dioxide (up to 50 percent), hydrogen (up to 40 percent), and nitrogen (up to 20 percent)
24. About a third of people produce methane, a notorious greenhouse gas, while two-thirds produce none at all.
25. The smell of a fart is composed largely of hydrogen sulfide, even though hydrogen sulfide accounts for only about one to three parts per million of what is expelled.

21. WHEN THINGS GO VERY WRONG: CANCER

1. Pneumonia is the ninth most common cause of death. Heart disease number one, and cancer second.
2. Today some 40 percent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives.
3. Half of men over sixty and three-quarters over seventy, for instance, have prostate cancer at death without being aware of it. It has been suggested, in fact, that if all men lived long enough, they would all get prostate cancer.
4. They divide without limit.
5. They grow without direction or influence from outside agents like hormones.
6. They engage in angiogenesis, which is to say they trick the body into giving them a blood supply.
7. They disregard any signals to stop growing.
8. They fail to succumb to apoptosis, or programmed cell death.
9. They metastasize, or spread to other parts of the body.
10. What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.
11. Cancer cells are just like normal cells except that they are proliferating wildly. Because they are so seemingly normal, the body sometimes fails to detect them and doesn’t invoke an inflammatory response as it would with a foreign agent. That means that most cancers in their early stages are painless and invisible. It is only when tumors grow big enough to press on nerves or form a lump that we become aware that something is wrong. Some cancers can quietly accrete for decades before they become evident. Others never become evident at all.
12. Even when seemingly defeated, cancer may leave behind “sleeper” cells that can lie dormant for years before springing to life again. Above all, cancer cells are selfish. Normally, human cells do their job, then die on command when instructed to by other cells for the good of the body. Cancer cells don’t.
13. “They have evolved to avoid detection. They can hide from drugs. They can develop resistance. They can recruit other cells to help them. They can go into hibernation and wait for better conditions. They can do any number of things that make it hard for us to kill them.”
14. Eighty percent of cancers, known as carcinomas, arise in epithelial cells — that is, the cells that make up the skin and the linings of organs.
15. Between birth and the age of forty, men have just a one in seventy-one chance of getting cancer and women one in fifty-one, but over sixty the odds drop to one in three for men and one in four for women. An eighty-year-old person is a thousand times more likely than a teenager to develop cancer.
16. mustard gas dramatically slowed the creation of white blood cells in those exposed to it. From this, it was realized that some derivative of mustard gas might be useful in treating some cancers. Thus was born chemotherapy.

1. Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions.
2. There’s so much animal poop that it’s actually the second-biggest cause of emissions in agriculture, behind enteric fermentation.
3. In Europe, industrialized parts of Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 20 percent of food is simply thrown away, allowed to rot, or otherwise wasted. In the United States, it’s 40 percent.
4. When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
5. Along with Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat and new varieties of corn and rice, synthetic fertilizer was a key factor in the agricultural revolution that changed the world in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s been estimated that if we couldn’t make synthetic fertilizer, the world’s population would be 40 to 50 percent smaller than it is.
6. Fertilizer provides plants with essential nutrients, including phosphorus, potassium, and the one that’s especially relevant to climate change: nitrogen.
7. Fertilizers were responsible for roughly 1.3 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2010, and the number will probably rise to 1.7 billion tons by mid-century.
8. There’s more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined.
9. the American-style diet is responsible for almost as many emissions as all the energy Americans use in generating electricity, manufacturing, transportation, and buildings.
10. How much carbon dioxide can a tree absorb in its lifetime? It varies, but a good rule of thumb is 4 tons over the course of 40 years.
11. You’d need somewhere around 50 acres’ worth of trees, planted in tropical areas, to absorb the emissions produced by an average American in her lifetime. Multiply that by the population of the United States, and you get more than 16 billion acres, or 25 million square miles, roughly half the landmass of the world.

CHAPTER 7 HOW WE GET AROUND

1. 16 percent of 51 billion tons a year
2. Gas contains an amazing amount of energy — you’d need to bundle 130 sticks of dynamite together to get as much energy as a single gallon of gas contains.
3. Gasoline is cheaper than Dasani bottled water, yogurt, honey, laundry detergent, maple syrup, hand sanitizer, latte from Starbucks, Red Bull energy drink, olive oil, and the famously low-cost Charles Shaw wine
4. Transportation contributes only 16 percent of global emissions, ranking fourth behind how we make things, plug in, and grow things.
5. Although transportation isn’t the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot.
6. For the first 99.9 percent of human history, we managed to move around without relying on fossil fuels at all. We walked, rode animals, and put ships under sail. Then, in the early 1800s, we figured out how to run locomotives and steamboats on coal, and we never looked back. Within the century, trains were crossing entire continents and ships were moving people and products across the oceans. The gas-powered automobile came along in the late 19th century, followed in the early 20th century by the commercial air travel that would become so essential to today’s global economy.
7. It’s aviation, trucking, and shipping — not passenger cars — that account for all the emissions growth in this sector.
8. Maritime shipping now handles nine-tenths of the goods traded around the world by volume, producing nearly 3 percent of global emissions.
9. passenger vehicles (cars, SUVs, motorcycles, and such) are responsible for almost half the emissions. Medium- and heavy-duty vehicles — everything from garbage trucks to 18-wheelers — account for another 30 percent. Airplanes add in a tenth of all emissions, as do container ships and other marine vessels, with trains accounting for the last bit.

1. There are about a billion cars on the road around the world.
2. In 2018 alone, we added roughly 24 million passenger cars, after accounting for the ones that got retired.
3. With the price of today’s batteries, EV owners save money only if gas costs more than around $3 per gallon.
4. The city of Shenzhen, China — home to 12 million people — has electrified its entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses and nearly two-thirds of its taxis.
5. Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you’ll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas.
6. an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo. And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would need so many batteries that it could hardly carry any cargo at all.
7. A typical truck running on diesel can go more than 1,000 miles without refueling.
8. When a jet takes off, the fuel it’s carrying accounts for 20 to 40 percent of its weight.
9. You’d need 35 times more batteries by weight to get the same energy as jet fuel.
10. The bigger the vehicle you want to move, and the farther you want to drive it without recharging, the harder it’ll be to use electricity as your power source.
11. The best all-electric plane on the market can carry two passengers, reach a top speed of 210 miles per hour, and fly for 3 hours before recharging.
12. A mid-capacity Boeing 787 can carry 296 passengers, reach up to 650 miles an hour, and fly for nearly 20 hours before stopping for fuel.
13. A fossil-fuel-powered jetliner can fly more than three times as fast, for six times as long, and carry nearly 150 times as many people as the best electric plane on the market.
14. The best conventional container ships can carry 200 times more cargo than either of the two electric ships now in operation, and they can run routes that are 400 times longer.
15. Shipping alone accounts for 3 percent of all emissions.
16. military submarines and aircraft carriers run on nuclear power already.

CHAPTER 8 HOW WE KEEP COOL AND STAY WARM

1. 7 percent of 51 billion tons a year
2. Malaria kills 400,000 people a year, most of them children.
3. All the electricity used by buildings — for air-conditioning as well as lights, computers, and so on — is responsible for nearly 14 percent of all greenhouse gases.
4. Together, furnaces and water heaters account for a third of all emissions that come from the world’s buildings.
5. We’ll add 2.5 trillion square feet of buildings by 2060, the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month for 40 years.
6. Smart glass, which automatically turns darker when the room needs to be cooler and lighter when it needs to be warmer.

CHAPTER 9 ADAPTING TO A WARMER WORLD

1. As the climate gets warmer, droughts and floods will become more frequent, wiping out harvests more often. Livestock eat less and produce less meat and milk. The air and soil lose moisture, leaving less water available for plants.
2. Urban areas are home to more than half the people on earth
3. Making water out of thin air — A solar powered dehumidifier with advanced filtering system to filter out air pollution costs thousands of dollars today.
4. Most approaches to geoengineering are based on the idea that to compensate for all the warming caused by greenhouse gases we’ve added to the atmosphere, we need to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth by around 1 percent.
5. Sunlight is absorbed by the earth at a rate of about 240 watts per square meter. There’s enough carbon in the atmosphere now to absorb heat at an average rate of about 2 watts per square meter. So we need to make the sun dimmer by 2/240, or 0.83 percent. However, because clouds would adjust to solar geoengineering, we would actually need to dim the sun a bit more, to about 1 percent of the incoming sunlight. If the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubles, it would absorb heat at a rate of about 4 watts per square meter, and we would need to double the dimming to about 2 percent.
6. To get the 1 percent reduction of sunlight, we’d only need to brighten clouds that cover 10 percent of the earth’s area by 10 percent.

CHAPTER 10 WHY GOVERNMENT POLICIES MATTER

1. In 2019 America exported more energy than it imported for the first time in nearly 70 years.
2. Companies in the energy business spend an average of just 0.3 percent of their revenue on energy R&D. The electronics and pharmaceutical industries, by contrast, spend nearly 10 percent and 13 percent, respectively.
3. We can reduce Green Premiums by making carbon-free things cheaper (which involves technical innovation), by making carbon-emitting things more expensive (which involves policy innovation), or by doing some of both.

CHAPTER 11 A PLAN FOR GETTING TO ZERO

1. Technologies needed: Hydrogen produced without emitting carbon, Grid-scale electricity storage that can last a full season, Electrofuels, Advanced biofuels, Zero-carbon cement, Zero-carbon steel, Plant- and cell-based meat and dairy, Zero-carbon fertilizer, Next-generation nuclear fission, Nuclear fusion, Carbon capture (both direct air capture and point capture), Underground electricity transmission, Zero-carbon plastics, Geothermal plastics, Pumped hydro, Thermal storage ,Drought- and flood-tolerant food crops, Zero-carbon alternatives to palm oil, Coolants that don’t contain F-gases
2. government funding for clean energy R&D amounts to about $22 billion per year, only around 0.02 percent of the global economy. Americans spend more than that on gasoline in a single month. The United States, which is by far the largest investor in clean energy research, spends only about $7 billion per year.

What is Web 3

Web3 is a user-owned internet. Cryptocurrencies & NFTs are digital assets that enable Web3 to be user-owned. Smart contracts are Web3 software applications that are user-owned. Blockchain is the tech that enables crypto, NFTs & smart contracts.

web2: Net Promoter Score

web3: Net Community Score

With Web3, end-consumers take back the ownership of their own data. Instead of forgoing their data and their privacy to the big tech companies, they’re able to control their own data — living in a cryptographic, decentralized mesh of computers that combine to become a distributed data center rivaling GCP and AWS.

NFTs cryptographically prove that you, and you alone, are the owner of your digital items. And no one else can take them away from you.

The Metaverse is a virtual extension of our current existence.

What are Daos

Like how DeFi is programmable money and how NFTs are programmable media, DAOs are programmable organizations of people.

DAOs allow holders to simultaneously be an investor, operator, and user of the protocol.

Going deep into the rabbit hole called web3 (read more here)

Web1 (1980s — early 2000’s) The first phase of the Internet, Web1, was mainly about providing the everyday consumer with online content and information.

• As consumers could only read information or content online, and not yet interact with it, Web1 was incredibly static.
• When you think about Web1, think Internet Explorer, Yahoo, or Netscape. While web1 was read-only, the companies we associate with web1 were built on open protocols (meaning pretty much any person or organization could build on the internet and know they were subject to the same rules as the next person or organization).

Web2 is the version of the internet most of us know and use today. Where Web1 was static and “read-only,” Web2 was “read-write,” and interactive. Under Web2, the internet became more usable: web2 was dynamic and users could consume, interact with, and create content on the internet themselves.

• Along the way, the internet became largely dominated by four behemoths today we know as Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Web2 also saw an explosion in the use of smartphones, and most of internet use was through mobile apps and hardware built by these companies. While this meant more people could participate in the internet, it also meant the internet was becoming increasingly controlled by the leading digital platforms.
• Why is this a problem? In the centralized internet we know today, Apple can take a 30% cut on all paid-app downloads and in-app purchases, Twitter and Facebook can de-platform the POTUS, and the everyday consumer has less privacy, security, and control over their online information than ever before.

Web3, the future internet we’re moving towards, is a decentralized internet. Under Web3, the internet is shared online and governed by the collective “we,” rather than owned by centralized entities.The Web3 world is one that has open-source protocols at its foundation. additional features and Web3 is about rearchitecting internet services and products so that they benefit people rather than entities.

Web1: Read

Web2: Read-Write

Web3: Read-Write-Own

Web 1: Read-only Companies Create & Companies Profit

Web 2: Read/Write People Create & Companies Profit

Web 3: Read/Write People Create & People Profit

I would conclude with some more reading material on Web3:

https://www.notion.so/web3-starter-pack-8f953b437c6b4faa9f94af11bfc94193

1. The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.
2. An employable person is the one you will never find in a history book, because these people are designed to never leave their mark on the course of events.
3. An employee is—by design—more valuable inside a firm than outside of it; that is, more valuable to the employer than the marketplace.
4. An employee signal a certain type of domestication. Someone who has been employed for a while is giving you strong evidence of submission.
5. He is an obedient, housebroken dog. A dog claiming to be a wolf.
6. Ironically the highest status, that of a free man, is usually indicated by voluntarily adopting the mores of the lowest class. Consider that English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
7. People follow what’s optimal for their jobs, not what’s optimal for their company/country
8. It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.
9. To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.
10. The type of distributions—called fat tails—associated with it made the analyses more delicate, far more delicate, and it had become my mathematical specialty. In Mediocristan, changes over time are the result of the collective contributions of the center, the middle. In Extremistan these changes come from the tails. Sorry if you don’t like it, but that is purely mathematical.
11. If the process is fat-tailed (Extremistan), then wealth is generated at the top, which means increases in wealth lead to increases of measured inequality.
12. thieves do not enter impecunious homes, and one is more likely to be drinking poison in a golden cup than an ordinary one. Poison is drunk in golden cups
13. It is easy to scam people by getting them into complications — the poor are spared that type of scamming. Academics sell the most possibly complicated solution when a simple one can do. Further, the rich start using “experts” and “consultants.” An entire industry meant to swindle you will swindle you: financial consultants, diet advisors, exercise experts, lifestyle engineers, sleeping councilors, breathing specialists, etc.
14. if wealth is giving you fewer options instead of more (and more varied) options, you’re doing it wrong.
15. Being rich you need to hide your money if you want to have what I call friends. This may be known; what is less obvious is that you may also need to hide your erudition and learning.
16. Community as a space within which many rules of competition and hierarchy are lifted, where the collective prevails over one’s interest.
17. Sophistication can, at some level, cause degradation, what economists call “negative utility.” This tells us something about wealth and the growth of gross domestic product in society; it shows the presence of an inverted U curve with a level beyond which you get incremental harm. It is detectable only if you get rid of constructed preferences.
18. The best enemy is the one you own by putting skin in his game and letting him know the exact rules that come with it. You keep him alive, with the knowledge that he owes his life to your benevolence.
19. An enemy you own is better than 10 dead ones.
20. Anonymity brings out the a**hole in people. So I accidentally discovered a way to change the behavior of unethical and abusive persons without verbal threat . Take their pictures. Just the act of taking their pictures is similar to holding their lives in your hands and controlling their future behavior thanks to your silence. They don’t know what you can do with it, and will live in a state of uncertainty.
21. In the past, bad deeds were only transmitted to acquaintances who knew how to put things in perspective. Today, strangers, incapable of judging a person’s general character, have become self-appointed behavior police. Web-shaming is much more powerful than past reputational blots, and more of a tail risk.
22. Plato anticipated the later Christian contrivance “you are watched.” The discussion was whether people behave in a right manner because they are watched — or, according to Socrates, because of their character.
23. If we don’t understand something and it has a systemic effect, just avoid it.
24. Unreliable people carried less weight than reliable ones. You can’t fool people more than twice.
25. In business me-tooism is penalized.
26. You can criticize either what a person said or what a person meant. The former is more sensational, hence lends itself more readily to dissemination. The mark of a charlatan — say the writer and pseudo-rationalist Sam Harris — is to defend his position or attack a critic by focusing on some specific statement (“look at what he said”) rather than blasting his exact position (“look at what he means” or, more broadly, “look at what he stands for”) — for the latter requires an extensive grasp of the proposed idea.
27. A group of neurons or genes, like a group of people, differs from the individual components—because the interactions are not necessarily linear
28. Going from 1,000 to 1,001 may cause complexity to be multiplied by a billion times. — Curve of dimensionality
29. Understanding how the subparts of the brain (say, neurons) work will never allow us to understand how the brain works.
30. The average behavior of the market participant will not allow us to understand the general behavior of the market.
31. You can examine markets as markets and individuals as individuals, but markets are not sums of average individuals (a sum is an average multiplied by a constant so they are both equally affected)
32. Society doesn’t evolve by consensus, voting, majority, committees, verbose meetings, academic conferences, tea and cucumber sandwiches, or polling; only a few people suffice to disproportionately move the needle. All one needs is an asymmetric rule somewhere—and someone with soul in the game. And asymmetry is present in about everything.
33. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” wrote Margaret Mead. Revolutions are unarguably driven by an obsessive minority. And the entire growth of society, whether economic or moral, comes from a small number of people.
34. Science isn’t the sum of what scientists think, but exactly as with markets, it is a procedure that is highly skewed. Once you debunk something, it is now wrong. Had science operated by majority consensus, we would be still stuck in the Middle Ages, and Einstein would have ended as he started, a patent clerk with fruitless side hobbies.
35. The overall stock markets currently represent more than thirty trillion dollars, but a single order in 2008, only fifty billion, that is, less than two-tenths of a percent of the total, triggered a drop of close to 10 percent, causing losses of around three trillion dollars.
36. Genes follow majority rule; languages minority rule. Languages travel; genes less so.
37. Understanding the genetic makeup of a unit will never allow us to understand the behavior of the unit itself.
38. Under the right market structure, a collection of idiots produces a well-functioning market.
39. Individuals don’t need to know where they are going; markets do.
40. Leave people alone under a good structure and they will take care of things.
41. Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.
42. Survival comes first, truth, understanding, and science later.
43. First, live; then philosophize— Hobbes
44. Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason. — Lindy Effect
45. Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.