Nexus Quotes

“Populism undermines democracy in another, more subtle, but equally dangerous way. Having claimed that they alone represent the people, populists argue that the people is not just the sole legitimate source of political authority but the sole legitimate source of all authority.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Si la tarea principal de la información hubiera sido representar con precisión la realidad, habría sido difícil explicar por qué la Biblia se ha convertido en uno de los textos más influyentes de la historia.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“Las maravillas de la evolución son posibles debido a que el ADN no representa una realidad preexistente, sino que crea nuevas realidades.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“We yearn to be understood, but other humans often fail to understand how we feel, because they are preoccupied with their own feelings.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Money is supposed to be a universal measure of value, rather than a token used only in some settings. But as more things are valued in terms of information, while being "free" in terms of money, at some point it becomes misleading to evaluate the wealth of individuals and corporations in terms of the number of dollars or pesos they possess.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In the 1890s and first decade of the twentieth century, Bialik, a Ukrainian Jew, published numerous poems and stories bewailing the persecution and weakness of European Jews and calling on them to take their fate in their hands—to defend themselves by force of arms, immigrate to Palestine, and there establish their own state. One of his most stirring poems was written following the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, in which forty-nine Jews were murdered and dozens more were injured.[1] “In the City of Slaughter” condemned the murderous antisemitic mob who perpetrated the atrocities, but it also criticized the Jews themselves for their pacifism and helplessness. In one heart-wrenching scene, Bialik describes how Jewish women were gang-raped, while their husbands and brothers hid nearby, afraid to intervene. The poem compares the Jewish men to terrified mice and imagines how they quietly prayed to God to perform some miracle, which failed to materialize. The poem then tells how even after the pogrom was over, the survivors had no thought of arming themselves and instead entered Talmudic disputations about whether the raped women were now ritualistically “defiled” or whether they were still “pure.” This poem is mandatory reading in many Israeli schools today. It is also mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand how after two millennia of being one of the most pacifist groups in history, Jews built one of the most formidable armies in the world. Not for nothing was Bialik named Israel’s national poet.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“As Saint Augustine famously said, “To err is human; to persist in error is diabolical.”[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

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― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus. Una breve historia de las redes de información desde la Edad de Piedra hasta la IA

“More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“But some stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The two levels of reality that preceded storytelling are objective reality and subjective reality. Objective reality consists of things like stones, mountains, and asteroids—things that exist whether we are aware of them or not. An asteroid hurtling toward planet Earth, for example, exists even if nobody knows it’s out there. Then there is subjective reality: things like pain, pleasure, and love that aren’t “out there” but rather “in here.” Subjective things exist in our awareness of them. An unfelt ache is an oxymoron.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“It should be emphasized that rejecting the naive view of information as representation does not force us to reject the notion of truth, nor does it force us to embrace the populist view of information as a weapon.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Information is something that creates new realities by connecting different points into a network.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“There certainly are instances of information that attempt to represent reality and succeed in doing so, but this is not the defining characteristic of information.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The naive view further believes that the solution to the problems caused by misinformation and disinformation is more information. This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, is associated with the U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Misinformation is an honest mistake, occurring when someone tries to represent reality but gets it wrong. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, occurring when someone consciously intends to distort our view of reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Truth, then, isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Another problem with any attempt to represent reality is that reality contains many viewpoints.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all its aspects.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“It is particularly crucial to remember that elections are not a method for discovering truth. Rather, they are a method for maintaining order by adjudicating between people’s conflicting desires.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“An alternative populist solution is to abandon the modern scientific ideal of finding the truth via “research” and instead go back to relying on divine revelation or mysticism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“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.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“Accordingly, whenever anyone says anything, the question to ask isn’t, “What is being said? Is it true?” but rather, “Who is saying this? Whose privileges does it serve?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“This particular line of radical leftist thinking goes back to Karl Marx, who argued in the mid-nineteenth century that power is the only reality, that information is a weapon, and that elites who claim to be serving truth and justice are in fact pursuing narrow class privileges.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,” which they wield to vanquish rivals. According to this worldview, power is the only reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“In a nutshell, populism views information as a weapon.[”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

“The naive view is of course more nuanced and thoughtful than can be explained in a few paragraphs, but its core tenet is that information is an essentially good thing, and the more we have of it, the better.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI