updated 2h ago
Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Bryan Sivak added 2mo ago
On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humanki
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Bryan Sivak added 2mo ago
To understand all this we need to go back and investigate who Homo sapiens really is, how humanism became the dominant world religion and why attempting to fulfil the humanist dream is likely to cause its disintegration. This is the basic plan of the book.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Bryan Sivak added 2mo ago
Large animals were the main victims because they were relatively few, and they bred slowly. Compare, for example, mammoths (which became extinct) to rabbits (which survived). A troop of mammoths numbered no more than a few dozen individuals, and bred at a rate of perhaps just two youngsters per year. Hence if the local human tribe hunted just three
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Alex Dobrenko added 3mo ago
the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Bryan Sivak added 2mo ago
They didn’t see anything wrong with that, just as we don’t see anything wrong in opening the lid of a vending machine and observing its gears and conveyors. In the early twenty-first century there are still plenty of people who argue that animals have no consciousness, or at most, that they have a very different and inferior type of consciousness.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Alex Dobrenko added 3mo ago
What exactly are the conscious experiences that constitute the flow of the mind? Every subjective experience has two fundamental characteristics: sensation and desire.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Alex Dobrenko added 3mo ago
Instead, the crucial factor in our conquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another.
from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
Alex Dobrenko added 3mo ago
If cooperation is the key, how come the ants and bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb even though they learned to cooperate en masse millions of years before us? Because their cooperation lacks flexibility. Bees cooperate in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight. If a hive faces a new threat or a new op
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Alex Dobrenko added 3mo ago