Man is judged by his ability to think. That's all we've ever had for us. To put 2 and 2 together to make 4, to conquer kingdoms, to stare right through the heavens, and to make something out of nothingness. People, (including myself) don't think anymore. I want to understand why. There's never been an immortal human society, I want to understand why.
It's scary to me how we don't think about the fact that something happened 200 years ago (Circa 1850) that totally changed the world.
While I am still developing my mental model, here's a list of wisdom that has influenced me so far:
- Kapil Gupta on giving advice - "if you're drowning, would you ask me what to do?"
- mimetic theory by Rene Girard
- works of machiavelli on human nature, power, and the perils of niceness
- the need for fallibility and optimism by David Deutsch
- S3 companies
- Great Founder Theory by Samo Burja
- Black Swan, Skin in the game, Randomness, and Antifragility by Nassim Taleb
- If you were ignorant about a phenomenon, that was a fact about your own state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself; that your uncertainty was a fact about you, not a fact about whatever you were uncertain about; that ignorance existed in the mind, not in reality; that a blank map did not correspond to a blank territory. There were mysterious questions, but a mysterious answer was a contradiction in terms. A phenomenon could be mysterious to some particular person, but there could be no phenomenon mysterious of themselves. To worship a sacred mystery was just to worship your own ignorance.