You have to know how to co-operate with other people if you want to stay alive and raise children. And to do that, you need to know something about them. You need to know who loves whom, who hates whom, who is sleeping with whom. Who is honest, who is a cheat.
Interpretation
Understanding others is essential for cooperation and survival in social contexts.
This quote emphasizes the significance of interpersonal relationships and social dynamics in ensuring both individual survival and the successful upbringing of children. It suggests that to navigate societal complexities and foster cooperation, one must be aware of the relational ties among individuals, including love, conflict, and honesty.
In practice
In a team-building workshop, we discussed how understanding each other's strengths enhances cooperation.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends.
Once the love bug wears off, as it inevitably does, you are shocked to discover that you really didn't know the object of your affections at all. We know this to be so, even as we repeat the same mistake over and over and over.
We're all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away--our stories. I guess that's what I love about books--they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another for a small bit of time, that make us feel less alone or even more comfortable with our aloneness, if need be.
'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene.
My feminist training was that this was your goal, to be a self-sufficient woman, but that is a miscalculation. It's just not the way we work. We work in dialogue with the community.
It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate only on what is most significant and important.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.