📚 Quinn's Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what Quinn's read, .

Cynics are those who actively oppose change. NOBL recognizes that “cynics’ negativity can be annoying,” but engaging with them and trying to convince them can often be a huge time suck when it comes to leading change. Here’s the magic: “cynics are just disappointed idealists.” Perhaps they have gotten their hopes up about change only to be let down. Unlike a fence-sitter, a cynic is at least actively engaged with the change effort so spend your time delivering “something that matters” to your cynics, because actions will speak much louder than words. And if you are successful, your greatest cynics, once won over, will often become your greatest advocates.

Becoming a Changemaker

Alex Budak

Why Bigger Animals Live Longer: The Relationship between Size, Energy, and Longevity Summary: The larger an animal is, the more efficient it becomes in terms of energy consumption. This is because the self-similar fractal structure of larger animals allows them to save energy. Bigger animals require less energy proportionally to run their bodies due to the massive amount of tissue per gram or per cell. As a result, bigger animals experience less wear and tear and live longer than smaller animals. The reason for less wear and tear is that bigger animals use less energy and create less damage, reducing entropy. This principle can also be observed in machines, where those subjected to less stress and driven at lower revs per minute tend to last longer. Transcript: Speaker 2 So that's why we don't need to double our metabolism when we double our weight. It's that fractal like self similarity that allows us to get these essentially efficient savings in the amount of energy we need. So it's better to be bigger, isn't it? Because you don't need as much energy proportionally to run yourself. Correct. Speaker 1 So you need massive tissue per gram of tissue or per cell. You need less energy, the bigger you are. And by the way, this has huge consequences throughout all aspects of biology and life. And maybe one just to tie it back to the beginning of this discussion where we started out by talking about aging and mortality. This means that the bigger you are, the less hard your cell is working. The bigger you are, there's less wear and tear the longer you live systematically. So this is the origin of why bigger things live longer than smaller things. Speaker 2 And why is there less wear and tear if you're bigger? Speaker 1 You're using less energy and creating less entropy. That is you're creating less damage the bigger you are because simply you're using much less energy if you have an engine, an automobile and you insist on racing it at 10,000 revs per Minute every time you drive it, I can assure you that car will not live as long as a car that's driven by a little old lady or a little old man like me who keeps the revs at about two or three Thousand revs per minute. So you know, cars and machines last much longer, the less stress you put on them.

Scaling 2 — You and I Are Fractals

Simplifying Complexity

"What Information Consumes Is Attention" and The Thermodynamics of Communication Summary: Herbert Simon's quote about information consuming attention is a crucial point to consider. Emails can be overwhelming, as there is a limit to the amount of time and attention we have. It is important not to solely rely on the internet as a copying machine, but to acknowledge the real material scarcities and limitations. While there is room for improvement, there are still real world limits to communication effectiveness. Transcript: Speaker 3 Herbert Simon's famous 1971 quote that what information consumes is attention feels like such a crucial point that I made it my email signature you know because like you said earlier Glenn that you know the value is really in in the relationships and there are differentially scalable qualities here I think a lot about the way and Doug Rushkoff and others have pointed Out that you can have at least you know indefinitely many emails a day but you only have so much time and attention to read them and that this is part of the argument for the importance of Not just following the sort of logic of the internet as a great copying machine off a cliff right where we're imagining an abundance that is nonetheless still founded in real material Scarcities you know like David Wolpert talks about you know the thermodynamics of communication and there being a theoretical limit to how effective that can be and while we still Have plenty of room you know orders of magnitude to improve on that you know that there are these real world limits that we're eventually going to bump up into

Glen Weyl & Cris Moore on Plurality, Governance, and Decentralized Society

COMPLEXITY: Physics of Life

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