Omar

“As we have seen again and again throughout history, in a completely free information fight, truth tends to lose. To tilt the balance in favour of truth, networks must develop and maintain strong self-correcting mechanisms that reward truth telling. These self-correcting mechanisms are costly, but if you want to get the truth, you must invest in them.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do. Conservatives talk as if they want a small state but support a national security and surveillance apparatus of terrifying scope and power. Both sides are attached to a rhetoric of government that is routinely betrayed by their actions. The big government–small government divide is often more a matter of sentiment than substance.”
― Ezra Klein, Abundance

“Populists have sought to extricate themselves from this conundrum in two different ways. Some populist movements claim adherence to the ideals of modern science and to the traditions of skeptical empiricism. They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself. This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves.
This approach may sound scientific and may appeal to free-spirited individuals, but it leaves open the question of how human communities can cooperate to build health-care systems or pass environmental regulations, which demand large-scale institutional organization. Is a single individual capable of doing all the necessary research to decide whether the earth’s climate is heating up and what should be done about it? How would a single person go about collecting climate data from throughout the world, not to mention obtaining reliable records from past centuries? Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI