Squirrel

This will be a theme of 2025. Understand what was formerly scarce and is now commoditized. Don’t shrink from it. Play with it. Experiment. See what it can do that you used to have to do. Learn what you can do with it that you couldn’t before.

conducting a literature search of 89 different stories told by seven different forager cultures in Thailand, Malaysia, Africa and elsewhere. All of the tales carried lessons about social cooperation, empathy and justice, and many taught sexual equality

The Greeks had no sacred text but, for them, these epics took on a stature equivalent to it. Like the foundational literature we speak of in the next section, the epic poems of Homer were among the first things they wrote down around 725 BCE. The poems created a world connecting the Greeks to a heroic past and became the center of their cultural... See more

“its inner truth was realized when the participant was transported into the realm of the sacred and eternal.” For the ancients, this transcendent capacity was perhaps more evident, since there was no division between the supernatural and natural – the supernatural was natural.

Sapiens conquered the world because we can tell stories that inspire people to cooperate in very large numbers.

The rise of such voters itself raises two questions. First, why are swing voters more open to radicalism? And second, why did it accelerate so much in the past few years?

The more we rely on artificial intelligence for our knowledge base, the more we should be focused on what the training data includes and excludes. The answer may shape our future understanding of our shared history and the world around us.

Knowledge always needs someone to recognize. It is an active act, not something given by the world some

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we next explored whether storytelling does in fact promote cooperation. Nearly 300 Agta, from 18 separate camps, were asked to name the best storytellers. To assess cooperation, individuals were also asked to play a simple resource allocation game where players were given a number of tokens (representing rice) and asked to distribute these between... See more