Zachariyya Chouikh

“We should be afraid. Not of intelligent machines. But of machines making decisions that they do not have the intelligence to make. I am far more afraid of machine stupidity than of machine intelligence. Machine stupidity creates a tail risk. Machines can make many many good decisions and then one day fail spectacularly on a tail event that did not appear in their training data. This is the difference between specific and general intelligence.”
― Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans

“Page 43:
Natural selection is a multilevel process that operates among groups in addition to among individuals within groups. Any unit becomes endowed with the properties inherent in the word organism to the degree that it is a unit of selection. The history of life on earth has been marked by many transitions from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Organismic groups achieve their unity with mechanisms that suppress selection within without themselves being overtly altruistic. Human evolution falls within the paradigm of multilevel selection and the major transitions of life. Moral systems provide many of the mechanisms that enable human groups to function as adaptive units.”
― David Sloan Wilson, Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society

“Milk has been a key growth factor, be it in Japan or in the Netherlands. Before the Second World War, Dutch males were smaller than American men, but post-1950 US milk consumption declined while in the Netherlands it rose until the 1960s—and it remains higher than in the US. The lesson is obvious: the easiest way to improve a child’s chances of growing taller is for them to drink more milk. Is life expectancy finally topping out?”
― Vaclav Smil, Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

“The unconscious is the whole man—minus that part of man which corresponds to his society. Consciousness represents social man, the accidental limitations set by the historical situation into which an individual is thrown. Unconsciousness represents universal man, the whole man, rooted in the Cosmos; it represents the plant in him, the animal in him, the spirit in him; it represents his past down to the dawn of human existence, and it represents his future to the day when man will have become fully human, and when nature will be humanized as man will be “naturalized.”
― Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism