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in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
She rushed to another terminal and checked the computer’s rating of the signal’s recognizability: AAAAA. Before this, no radio signal received by Red Coast ever garnered a recognizability rating above C. An A rating meant the likelihood that the transmission contained intelligent information was greater than 90 percent. A rating of AAAAA was a special, extreme case: It meant the received transmission used the exact same coding language as Red Coast’s own outbound transmission. Ye turned on the Red Coast deciphering system. The software attempted to decipher any signal whose recognizability rating was above B. During the entire time that the Red Coast Project had been running, it had never been invoked even once in real use. Based on test data, deciphering a transmission suspected of being a message might require a few days or even a few months of computing time, and the result would be failure more than half the time. But this time, as soon as the file containing the original transmission was submitted, the display showed that the deciphering was complete. Ye opened the resulting document, and, for the first time, a human read a message from another world. The content was not what anyone had imagined. It was a warning repeated three times. Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!! Still caught up by the dizzying excitement and confusion, Ye deciphered a second message. This world has received your message. I am a pacifist in this world. It is the luck of your civilization that I am the first to receive your message. I am warning you: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!! There are tens of millions of stars in your direction. As long as you do not answer, this world will not be able to ascertain the source of your transmission. But if you do answer, the source will be located right away. Your planet will be invaded. Your world will be conquered! Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
“Raise Prices” This was Marc’s response to “If you could have a billboard anywhere, what would it say?” He’d put it right in the heart of San Francisco, and here’s the reason: “The number-one theme that companies have when they really struggle is they are not charging enough for their product. It has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible, under the theory that if it’s low-priced, everybody can buy it, and that’s how you get to volume,” he said. “And we just see over and over and over again people failing with that, because they get into a problem called ‘too hungry to eat.’ They don’t charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. Is your product any good if people won’t pay more for it?”
Tools of Titans
Timothy Ferriss
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