I was talking with a friend the other night about how much I enjoy the works of P. G. Wodehouse, especially the Jeeves novels. They are laugh-out-loud funny, even today, primarily because Wodehouse was a genius at ending a sentence differently than the reader expects. He does it dozens or hundreds of times in each […]
I got to participate in a live online event yesterday talking with Abundance authors Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. What a treat. I put myself in the queue for questions and asked the authors the following: now that the book has been out for a few weeks, how has it been going dealing with the media? Owing […]
Image via Wikipedia I have two words for you, Will Brown: Oh, piffle. I hate to resort to that kind of language, but really. So I’m to understand that because a bunch of 19th- and 20th-century lunkheads capitalized the word “History” so as to justify implementing their egregious theories about centralizing state power, we are […]
The question, as raised in a new book by Kevin Kelly, is apparently not just hypothetical. In What Technology Wants, tech guru Kevin Kelly sees the “technium” as a seamless extension of complex biology, evolving by the same rules… According to Kelly, technology is an emerging state of cosmic reality. We cannot reject it, so […]
How do we get people to work to improve each other’s lives? Matt Ridley says the two keys are free exhange and fossil fuels. Matt Ridley Talks About the Rational Optimist Ridley estimates that in is his lifetime the average citizen has become three times richer, has a lifespan that is 1/3 longer, has 1/3 […]
Image by Daniel Bachhuber via Flickr We’ve been talking about this for the past two weeks on the podcast. We officially kicked off our campaign to get 1000 people to read The Rational Optimist with a blog post last week, followed by setting up a Facebook group this week. So what’s the big deal, anyway? […]
Image by Daniel Bachhuber via Flickr We’ve been talking about this for the past two weeks on the podcast. We officially kicked off our campaign to get 1000 people to read The Rational Optimist with a blog post last week, followed by setting up a Facebook group this week. So what’s the big deal, anyway? […]
Turns out this planet we live on is chock full of optimists: Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years […]
I don’t think of myself predicting things. I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes. – Freeman Dyson
Probably old stuff for many of you, but I just happened to stumble upon Max More’s Dynamic Optimism this weekend. What a tremendous perspective on how the world can work, and how we ought to work within it. I was particularly taken by More’s opening paragraph: Angry faces filled the meeting room in my Oxford […]