Ajinkya Wadhwa

For example, if a friend told you that he wanted “I outperformed the S&P 500” on his tombstone, your immediate reaction would be to laugh. There is no way you’d take it as anything other than a joke.

On the largest scale, we’re all a part of a few vast pan-national cultural clouds—where customs like shaking hands, waving hi, New Year’s Eve, birthdays, card games, sports fandom, and tipping, to name a few, have taken on broadly shared meaning. Each nation is a smaller cloud with its own sub-culture.

And these decisions matter—because the cultures we spend time in have a major influence over us.

An animal’s behavior isn’t an independent entity. It’s the dependent variable in this equation:

Humans learn via direct experience, but their advanced language and imagination capabilities offer them a second learning pathway.

The Johnsons have problems. First there’s Moochie. (Their pet dog)

Not only could this mind within a mind think its own thoughts, it could actually overrule the will of the genes, override the software’s commands, and drive human behavior.

In this form, knowledge is not understanding. It’s merely an abstracted version of someone else’s lived experience; symbols on a page that attempt to summarize the nuances of each discovery.

Imagination allows you to consider an outlandish conspiracy theory—reason allows you to reject it as truth.