Sweet Potato Blog

20231216 - Preface xiii Where does Liberty come from? It comes from cooperation and balance. Divide up the work and cooperate lead to professions, which bring us high productivity. Balance (checks and balances on power) make this social cooperation sustainable. 20231219 - Chapter 1 How Does History End? 1 It should not be called "corridor". There are four stages of human society: Warre, The cage of norms (Absent), Despotic, and Shackled Leviathans. Warre is not stable. I think it would evolve into the cage of norms in dozens of years. The cage of norms is stable. Likely the countryside area of India. Despotic Leviathans represents oligarchy countries. Shackled Leviathans represents democracy countries. I believe that only Despotic Leviathans can be turned into Shackled Leviathans. One of the most important factor is serious external threat. I am curious that whether the authors would discuss political correctness in this book? I think it's one of the major challenge of de...

20240323 - Introduction 1 Scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth - it makes us less insightful, less forward-thinking, less controlled. p13 This "bandwidth" actually means "attention". We only have limited attention. How to allocate it everyday? If we pay too much attention to get coupon tickets, then we get less attention to create more value for society. "Think hard, think ahead" is almost impossible when we are facing scarcity. I think another trap is about "pleasure". We might pay too much attention to get more pleasure, when getting addicted to something such as drugs, computer games, sex, etc. From the other side, pleasure is becoming cheaper and easier to get, anywhere and anytime. Part One: The Scarcity Mindset 20240323 - 1. Focusing and Tunneling 19 It is exceedingly difficult to fool ourselves into working harder by faking a deadline. p27 Can we turn it into a game, and make it more fun? Give it a fake score to satisfy ourse...