This Will Make You Smarter

The physicist Murray Gell-Mann has spoken often of the need, when faced with multidimensional problems, to take a “crude look at the whole”—a process he has even given an acronym, CLAW.

his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines a black swan as an event of low probability, extreme impact, and only retrospective predictability.

Kakonomics is the strange yet widespread preference for mediocre exchanges insofar as nobody complains about them.

For that, we must look for and invest in quantum jumps in technology with low probability of success; we must create black-swan technologies. We must enable the multiplication of resources

Microbes have figured out all sorts of ways to harness Gibbs free energy by combining various gases, liquids, and rocks.

Supervenience is a shorthand abstraction, native to Anglo-American philosophy, that provides a general framework for thinking about how everything relates to everything else.

Conventional wisdom would recommend incremental improvements to maximize the potential of the existing infrastructure. The fundamental flaw in conventional wisdom is the failure to acknowledge the possibility of a black swan.

That is, life’s diversity does not exist because it is necessary for living things. Birds

Focusing on short-term, incremental solutions will only distract us from working on producing the home runs that could change the assumptions regarding energy and society’s resources.