Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation of reality. Telling a fictional story isn’t lying when you avoid such pretense and acknowledge that you are trying to create a new intersubjective reality

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together

The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem.

Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether

The sanctity of the Holy Rock, and of Jerusalem generally, is an intersubjective phenomenon that exists in the communication network connecting many human minds.

principle. This is not impossible. Engineers are already making considerable headway in encouraging AI to express self-doubt, ask for feedback, and admit its mistakes.[69] Yet no matter how aware algorithms are of their own fallibility, we should keep humans in

Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone—as the Neanderthals, for example, did—stories provided Homo sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains. In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story.

For example, in 1452 Pope Nicholas V issued the Dum Diversas bull, addressed to King Afonso V of Portugal and other Catholic monarchs. The bull said, “We grant you by these present documents, with our Apostolic Authority, full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens and pagans and any other unbelievers and

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.