“While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.”

“Yet there’s plenty of evidence that the non-human urge to display pain has profound and intrinsic communicative value. Take the cries of lambs or rat pups, which will fetch their mothers to groom and lick them. Or the way squeaking and writhing mice will draw a cagemate close. That attention and comfort minimises how bad or stressful an injury feels, a phenomenon known as social buffering.

[…]

That’s the drawback to showing you’re hurting: the signs that attract friends can also draw foes. More subtle expressions of pain, like facial expressions, could be a way around this conundrum. Grimacing gets the message across to those close by, without being immediately obvious to a predator lurking in the bushes. Indeed, many of the animals that show pain on their face, like rabbits, mice or sheep, are vulnerable prey animals.”

“Effort and reward have a linear relationship when the action is mindless and simple. Effort and reward have a diminishing returns relationship when the action is complex and multivariate.

But when the action becomes purely psychological—an experience that exists solely within our own consciousness—the relationship between effort and reward becomes inverted.

Pursuing happiness takes you further away from it. Attempts at greater emotional control only remove us from it. The desire for greater freedom is often what causes us to feel trapped. The need to be loved and accepted prevents us from loving and accepting ourselves.”

“But what if the nature of the economic puzzles that corporations evolved to solve have shifted? Thanks to software, the internet and artificial intelligence, the expenses that Coase identified can now be reduced just as well with tools from outside the company as they can from within it. Finding freelance workers via online marketplaces can be less costly, less risky and quicker than recruiting full-time employees. Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols – algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers. As a result of these innovations, a new way of working is emerging: a series of interactions that are open, skills-based and software-optimised. Where once we had the ‘corporation’, instead we are witnessing the ascendancy of the ‘platform’. The question is: should we see this as a promise, or a threat?

[…]

Recall that in closed platforms, as network effects increase, rents are subtracted and channelled to the shareholders or capital owners. But the users are not partaking in the spoils of their own participation. By contrast, in a tokenised platform, the value created by users’ transactions boosts the value of the tokens they own. Users can extract the maximum gain from their participation via token appreciation, rather than having the economic value of network effects skimmed off by remote shareholders.”

“Our model predicts the evolution of adult Homo sapiens-sized brains and bodies when individuals face a combination of 60% ecological, 30% cooperative and 10% between-group competitive challenges, and suggests that between-individual competition has been unimportant for driving human brain-size evolution. Moreover, our model indicates that brain expansion in Homo was driven by ecological rather than social challenges, and was perhaps strongly promoted by culture.”

“There’s so many times in life people try to change you,” Green says. “And sometimes, although someone may think they’re changing you for the better, it could be for the worse. And where [Kerr] helped me was, he didn’t try to change me. His whole thing to me was: How do you channel it? How do you channel your aggression, your passion? How do you use it, get it to where it’s always working for you, or never against you?”

[…]

“Like, No. 1, that person isn’t a pushover,” [Green] says. “I’d rather not deal with someone that’s a pushover. Because I know in life, sometimes you need to be told no. Sometimes you need to be told you’re wrong. And someone that’s just going to agree with me on everything I say or do, never tell me I’m wrong, they’re not good for my life. They’re usually there to get something out of you that they want. And when you kind of see that (strength) out of somebody, you know it’s not about what they want. Because if it was about what they want, you wouldn’t be there. That means a lot to me.”