Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideosSocial

But why does carnage so frequently follow a boost in well-being?569 One clue may come from the following puzzle: Murder rates rise after a war. You’d think they’d go up the most in the losing nations, whose citizens are frustrated and gnashing their teeth over their misfortune, but they don’t. Murders increase the most in the country that won.

Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History

Adam Appich, master of science, is there with several studies that show how legacy cognitive blindness will forever prevent people from acting in their own best interests.

Richard Powers • The Overstory: A Novel

Spontaneous order doesn’t sit well with people. We are all tempted to think that complex systems need management, a benign but firm hand. But just as market economies turn out better than command economies, languages are too complex, and used by too many people, to submit to command management. Individual decisions can be bad ones, and merit... See more

The Ultimatum Game made a significant contribution to undermining classical economic theories and to establishing the most important economic discovery of the last few decades: Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.

Yuval Noah Harari • Homo Deus

Obama a justement observé que, malgré les nombreuses insuffisances du package libéral, son bilan est bien meilleur que celui des solutions de rechange. La plupart des hommes n’ont jamais connu plus de paix et de prospérité que sous l’égide de l’ordre libéral au début du XXIe siècle. Pour la première fois de l’histoire, les maladies infectieuses

Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat • 21 Leçons pour le XXIème siècle (French Edition)

It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar

Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

Here is Eisner’s one-sentence summary of how to halve the homicide rate within three decades: “An effective rule of law, based on legitimate law enforcement, victim protection, swift and fair adjudication, moderate punishment, and humane prisons is critical to sustainable reductions in lethal violence.”

Steven Pinker • Enlightenment Now

In Through the Language Glass, the linguist Guy Deutscher reports that many primitive populations, without being color-blind, have verbal designations for only two or three colors.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb • Incerto 4-Book Bundle

Wars destroy wealth-generating capital, inflate away the assets of creditors, and induce the rich to put up with higher taxes, which the government redistributes into the paychecks of soldiers and munition workers, in turn increasing the demand for labor in the rest of the economy.