Hello!

Here's the weekly Amazing Things & Ideas newsletter.

Find one original idea on “Inter-generational cooperation” followed by the List.

Inter-generational cooperation

“The search for the truth is in one way hard and in another easy—for it is evident that no one of us can master it fully, nor miss it wholly. Each one of us adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled arises a certain grandeur.”

— Aristotle, Metaphysics, c. 350 BCE

Humanity has so far continually managed to build upon previous generations to enrich those prospective ones in the future through extraordinary work in the present. There may have been minor setbacks. Or very incremental progress at some points. But taken wholly, we have come a long way. And we of course, decide how long we’ve got further down the path that seems to lack a dead-end.

It’s unlikely we’d have achieved our current feats were it not for the extra-ordinary inter-generational cooperation performed by our species. A marvelous display of collectively adding to the pool of knowledge and building generation upon improved generation which leads to exactly this exciting phase for humans to create in.

Present choices affect the fate of the future still and will continue to do so. Thus it is in our hands to sway from catastrophe or stagnation and to give our descendants a world filled with possibility and wonder.

The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• Book I’m reading:

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

• David Deutsch on “our place in the Universe”:

“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.”

— David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

• Harari on the greatest scientific discovery:

“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Post from my blog this week:

• Things don’t have to be the same (#167):

  Excerpt: “We really don’t have to accept our preconceived limitations.”

Thank you for reading.

If you liked this newsletter, I encourage you to share it for others to see it too.

If you have any questions, suggestions, comments or criticisms, I'd love to hear them from you; please write to me by replying to this email or DM me on Twitter.

Onward,
Arjun