Short Thoughts: Stupidity vs Courage

Before we begin…

Not every Epiphany needs an essay. Most are starting points for further inquiry and discussion. Here are a few insights and observations I made throughout the week.

💭 Short Thoughts

1. 📖 Definitions

Stupidity is jumping into the unknown thinking that you know.

Courage is jumping into the unknown knowing that you don’t know.

2. 🙋 What is the most important skill of the modern world?

Asking good questions. This has always been the case, but even more so in the AI age as the means of production is further democratized. Therefore, knowing what you want for yourself, to build for others as well as prompting the machine is all based on questions.

3. 🤑 Why do we exhibit scarcity behavior when many of us have material abundance?

1st order hypothesis: We live in a capitalistic society that prioritizes the accumulation of capital: wealth and assets that can be used to produce more wealth and drive economic growth. This paradigm in many ways emulates Nature: competition around scarce resources, survival and reproduction of the fittest (i.e. natural selection).

In addition, humans are more sensitive to loss than gain (i.e. loss aversion bias). Therefore, we are prone to scarcity even after accumulating sufficient wealth.

Finally, we social compare. One study found that as societies evolve from rural to capitalistic, people tend to become less prosocial and more competitive through social learning and success bias. In other words, it’s hard to stay in our own lane when so much noise is bleeding across the road, especially in the Internet era.

2nd order inquiry: While capitalism has accomplished its purpose to bring us out of lower Maslow survival needs, we have not come up with new systems to lift us up to higher social and self-actualization levels. Therefore, we never evolved out of our base needs as a species. What got us here will not be what gets us to the next level.

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