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“A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say you always have the same threshold of reactions. You take a set level of abuse, say seventeen insulting remarks per week, before getting into a rage and punching the eighteenth offender in the nose. Such predictability will allow people to take advantage of you up to that well known trigger point.”

“Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending 18 hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis.”

“We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.”

Ask your local mathematician to define probability; he would most probably show you how to compute it. As we saw in Chapter 3 on probabilistic introspection, probably is not about odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive. Recall that mathematics is a tool to meditate, not compute.

“Unless you have confidence in the rulers reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the rulers reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and less about the table.

“Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.”

Throughout this book I find myself wondering if the author wrote it to take petty shots at frenemies or to shift the paradigm on everything we assume about probability.

Start stressing personal elegance at your next misfortune. Exhibit sapere covered (“know how to live”)in all circumstances.

Consequently, to measure how democratic an information network is, we cannot use a simple yardstick like whether elections are being held regularly. In Putins Russia, in Iran, and even in North Korea elections are held like clockwork. Rather, we need to ask much more complex questions like “What mechanisms prevent the central government from rigging the elections?”

This was a paradigm shifting book that affirmed my passion for traditional medicine. It‘s a helpful reminder of my insignificance, which I find a lot of levity in realizing. It leaves me wondering who or what is really in control. The layers of life and consciousness on our planet, galaxy, universe etc are astounding and one of my favorite things to think about.

I love when a book starts off screaming. Speaking to the world without being preachy. Addressing the now and the future. The reach is ambitious but well executed. Let’s see if this momentum continues I’m only a few pages in.

He reminds me, a woman who has loved Black men, of how hard it is to disentangle desire from the cruelty of the social order, of relations of power and domination. How hard it is to get truly close. Can anyone be vulnerable in all of this, safely? I shied away from his letters at first because they are hard to read. But they are truthful.

Interests and hate indiscriminately, how rare it is that we attend to their other stories. In my early childhood I had been given affection by those who chose differently than what the order prescribed. I knew the prospect of love along with the intimacy of the Black and White South.

I thought, sitting next to Tom, about the cost of writing the White Southerner out of the freedom movement story. Yes, there were many more who taunted and terrorized, more still who silently accepted racial terrorism. But what possibility was foreclosed by not seeing the fullness of what could have been, and what could still be. For all the smug assessments of how poor white Southerners vote against their own..

The South is extremely diverse and complex. It is multilingual, speaks different dialects, and has had different histories. But we do call certain things Southern in a broad way, some because they are quintessential and some because the être a marker of "not that," as in Northen, which really means not Midwestern, Northeastern, mid Atlantic, Northwestern, Californian, or far Southwest in general.

Some monuments are not human likeness but the persistence of creation of creation. Some monuments are destructive or ambiguous. Some are aspiration as well as recognition.

But I must also express outrage that as an American I am expected to digest the founding fathers venom casually, as though it is merely a part of the nations genealogy and not its soul.

The matter isn’t simply about anger, resentment, misunderstanding, or saying the wrong or right words. It es earthquake, fire, unmarked graves, and ash. Over and over again. You might think you know, but you probably don’t.

And in our lives, an intimate detente remains. A polite tension in top, a flame below. This might sound unfamiliar to you, but if you think for a moment about how conversations about race are approached in your life, the tentativeness and the terror that the conflagration might hit, you’ll see it much the same. Shame and rage collide. You might not understand why that is.

It really isn’t a regional story so much as a National one and a historic one. But the sweetest of the sweet tooth’s grew down here in part because of how the land was organized by deprivation even when what it yields as abundant. Slave labor, barely free labor, and the land itself were all worms to their limits. Something sweet gives you a little piece. Or peace.

According to epidemiologists and physicians. Southerners weigh too much, have too much tooth decay, eat too much fat, and drink too much coke. We cushion against hurt with abundance and love found in food. And we revel in taking up space with saying: "Only a dog wants a bone," we say. The constraints are rarely mentioned: overwork, poverty, the convenience of fast food. That’s all a part of the story.

In all of this, the lesson is that a properly functioning market does not seek to advance human happiness but rather to advance human wealth. What speaks in the market is money: purchasing power. If you have no money, you have no voice in the market. The market then acts as if it does not know that the cost and does not care whether you love or die.

conditions, exacerbated by the heat humans are adding to the party. Many regions will suffer the same problems that farmers face in Africa every season, when drought can wreck an entire regions hope for food and incomes. It’s very possible that our dreams for a global society in an industrialized world will have the unintended consequences of pushing most people into lives of poverty, hunger, and disease."

Some of the environmental changes we’re witnessing in the grain baskets of Africa and North America are cyclical changes that have nothing to do with humans use of fossil fuels. But if the Intergovernmental Panel on climate changes recent models of rising global temperatures from carbon emissions turn out to be accurate, we’ll soon be dealing with cynical drought..

to survive as independent beings. We aren’t aiming for a form of survival that looks like slave or worse.

"The ways humanity will endure, it’s worth keeping the idea of survivance in mind. One of the b at things about H. Sapiens is that we are more than the sum of our biological parts. We are minds, cultures, and civilizations. I don’t mean to say that people can log on ideals alone: that’s obviously stupid. But when we aspire to survive disaster, we are perhaps without realizing it aspiring to..”

"Vizenor coined the term "survivance" to describe the practices of natives today who are connected to their cultural traditions, but also living them dynamically, reshaping them to suite life in a world forever changed by colonial contact. The difference between survival and survivance is the difference between maintaining existence at a subsistence level and leading a life that is freely chosen. As we contemplate..

Planet had no Arctic ice cap. It was a period of intense heat when greenhouse conditions reigned and our hominid ancestors had not yet evolved. Though many animals thrive in the Miocene climate, humans would t. We are the products of a cold Earth, just like many of our mammal brethren. "We need to keep those ice caps," Ward said.

Peter award, a geologist at the University if Washington, who has written about mass extinctions in several books, including his influential work The Medea Hypothesis, believes carbon emissions mean that environmental change is almost inevitable. "We’re going back to the Miocene," he said, then laughed darkly. The Miocene, a geological age that ended roughly 5.3 million years ago, was the last time that the

If humans are going to make it in the long term, and preserve our planet along with us, we need to accept that change is the status quo. To survive this far, we’ve had to change dramatically over time, and we’ll have to change even more-remolding our world, our cities, and even our bodies. This book is going to show you how we’ll do it.