Steven Gutierrez

“There is a parallel in the behaviour of bees, which do not make the most of the system they have evolved to collect nectar and pollen. Although they have an efficient way of communicating about the direction of reliable food sources, the waggle dance, a significant proportion of the hive seems to ignore it altogether and journeys off at random. In the short term, the hive would be better off if all bees slavishly followed the waggle dance, and for a time this random behaviour baffled scientists, who wondered why 20 million years of bee evolution had not enforced a greater level of behavioural compliance. However, what they discovered was fascinating: without these rogue bees, the hive would get stuck in what complexity theorists call ‘a local maximum’; they would be so efficient at collecting food from known sources that, once these existing sources of food dried up, they wouldn’t know where to go next and the hive would starve to death. So the rogue bees are, in a sense, the hive’s research and development function, and their inefficiency pays off handsomely when they discover a fresh source of food. It is precisely because they do not concentrate exclusively on short-term efficiency that bees have survived so many million years.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

“Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Purity

“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “ History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.”

“History id what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”
― Kaliane Bradley, The Ministry of Time

“We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.”
― Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense