| His point about increasingly non zero-sum games reminds of a Steven Pinker talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk#t=890 "Technology has increased the number of positive sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people." We still have a tendency to revert to meanness when resources become scarce - e.g. dwindling runways without forthcoming funding or competitors eating away at our market share. In many cases, It plays into the death spiral - visionary thinking, paced discovery and creative exploration of a problem space are replaced with short-term thinking, churn, frustration, and ultimately failure. In developed nations we've had the privilege of being able to take our time, spending at least 12 years of our lives educating ourselves instead of ploughing fields. Hans Rosling's talks get into this too: technology has allowed people to liberate time previously devoted to sustenance farming, washing clothes, 4 hour walks to the market. That time gets shifted to activities like education. There's a common them here of not letting our immediate needs overwhelm our ability to pursue goals that can dramatically change our lives and the world around us. Our opportunity is rare and the privileged position we have to pursue ideas can often be tenuous. In a way, if we don't hit escape velocity, we don't simply float, we crash. Meanness is a hack (one that doesn't even have an explanatory comment). |