The Knowledge Center

A long but excellent article . My highlights are below: +Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: 1. The Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. 2. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. 3. The Scientific Revolution, which got underway only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different +Keep your eyes on the ball. Focus on the main global problems facing humanity: 1. Nuclear war 2. Ecological collapse 3. Technological disruption +Issues that politicians commonly talk about—terrorism, migration, inequality, poverty—are lesser worries, if not distractions. +Learn to distinguish reality from illusion +Care about suffering +Embrace ambiguity. + Progress is basically an illusion; the Agricultural Revolution was “history’s biggest fraud,” and liberal humanism is a religion no more founded on reality than any other. +Some of the social ills caused by a company like Facebook should be understood as bugs—“and, as good engineers, they are trying to fix the bugs” +Losing mental autonomy to A.I.—can be at least partly countered by citizens cultivating greater mindfulness +It’s possible to measure people’s blood pressure by processing video of their faces. A government that can see your blood boiling during a leader’s speech can identify you as a dissident +Freedom depends to a large extent on how much you know yourself, and you need to know yourself better than, say, the government or the corporations that try to manipulate you. +Homo sapiens became uniquely able to communicate untruths +“Money is a “fiction,” as are corporations and nations”. Fictions require believers, and exert power only as long as a “communal belief” in them persists. Every social construct, then, is a kind of religion +The danger facing the world could be “stated in the form of a simple equation, which might be the defining equation of the twenty-first century: B x C x D = AHH. Which means: biological knowledge, multiplied by computing power, multiplied by data, equals the ability to hack humans. +The thing “most responsible for your suffering is your own mind." + If we think about art as kind of playing on the human emotional keyboard, then I think A.I. will very soon revolutionize art completely.” + The forager economy provided most people with more interesting lives than agriculture or industry do +“One thing I think about how humans work—the only thing that can replace one story is another story.”

SÃO MIGUEL Book: Cet Autre Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski Talks about his relationship as thinker, journalist and traveller with "the other" and how perceptions are often ethnocentric and always biases. I would retain the sentence "we do not exist if there is no other to compare with". Much more to say about this little book as he explores the perspective of Anthropologists, philosophers and politicians and how this concept is manipulated. But turn around identity and how I relate to the "other", other color, culture, continent, religion, gender.... SASI Book: Enchantments of Mammon Author: Eugene McCarraher. I am only like 20% into the book so far but my key takeaways are that as humans we have moved away from seeing the divinity in people and nature (the "mana" whose invisible energy connects us us all) and magic in every day life. We have moved away from organised religion and replaced Money on the throne of God. We have put a value on nature and commoditised everything and Capitalism is the new religion with it's own mantras, priests and symbols. The author gives a lot of examples and takes you through the phases of the industrial revolution and the spread of Calvinism and Protestantism which made this happen. Huge book but quite enlightening so far. SILVIA Book: The body keeps the score: brain, mind and body in the transformation of trauma Author: Bessel van der Kolk Life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn genes on or off. If stressful events in life can trigger toxic biochemical responses by producing stress hormones like cortisol it is also true that social events like today's meeting can influence in a positive way our biochemistry by increasing the happy hormones like serotonin... what a beautiful way to regulate our body and mind by reading a good book with a hot drink and close to new and old friends. FELIPE Book: Quiet Author: Susan Cain It's only the beginning of the book, but during the meetup I read how Cain paid to join one of Tony Robbins' events to analyze possibly "the most extroverted person on the planet", she says. And also "the king of self-help". It was very interesting to read her critical analysis and detailed descriptions of some of the moments. The pros she points out: the way his psychology is practical; how he managed to assimilate the work of academic psychologists and package it for genuine insights; he absolutely loves what he does. The cons she points out: the constant commands that we must meet fear with extroversion; we must be vibrant, confident and never look hesitant; the constant upsells during the event for future events as expensive as 45,000 USD; the way he says we don't need to be extroverts, but acts in the complete opposite way.

An excellent course I took in London on January 25th, 2020. Alain de Botton and Raul Aparici spoke of self, sociability, work, failure, meaning and more. I tend to forget details, so some bullet points may not make much sense, but hope it's helpful anyway.