Sublime

Les experts hérissons creusaient un sillon très profondément, mais très étroit. Certains avaient passé toute leur carrière à étudier une seule question. Comme Ehrlich et Simon, ils établissaient des théories bien propres sur le fonctionnement du monde à travers les seules lentilles de leur spécialité, et tordaient tous les événements pour qu’ils s’

Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, sc

We must guard against a fallacy common among apologists of science, the fallacy of supposing that the men whose work most benefits humanity are thinking much of that while they do it,

Not only is specialisation becoming a redundant method of understanding truth, it is also a poor strategy for survival – whether for the individual, an organisation, a society or indeed an entire species. Simply put, then, Homo sapiens run the severe risk of perishing within the next two centuries unless the mind is reconditioned to allow for a van

It was a fluctuation in the monkey’s expectation, indicating that an earlier prediction had been in error; it was its brain learning a guess from a guess.

As he spoke, it seemed to me that he was being rocketed upward by the power of his own vision, into the highest reaches of space, watching the earth become smaller and smaller until it shrank into a single pixel. Arendt once referred to the view of the earth from space as the “Archimedean point,” drawing on the popular anecdote that Archimedes once

not vary.