## Metadata - Author: [[Yuval Noah Harari]] - Full Title: Nexus - Category: #books ## Highlights - Interestingly, Jesus’s last supper was the Jewish Passover meal, which according to the Gospel accounts Jesus shared with his disciples just before his crucifixion. In Jewish tradition, the whole purpose of the Passover meal is to create and reenact artificial memories. Every year Jewish families sit together on the eve of Passover to eat and reminisce about “their” exodus from Egypt. They are supposed not only to tell the story of how the descendants of Jacob escaped slavery in Egypt but to remember how they personally suffered at the hands of the Egyptians, how they personally saw the sea part, and how they personally received the Ten Commandments from Jehovah at Mount Sinai. ([Location 803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=803)) - In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It was the first known commercial transaction involving bitcoin—and with hindsight, also the most expensive pizza ever. By November 2021, a single bitcoin was valued at more than $69,000, so the bitcoins Hanyecz paid for his two pizzas were worth $690 million, enough to purchase millions of pizzas.[14] While the caloric value of pizza is an objective reality that remained the same between 2010 and 2021, the financial value of bitcoin is an intersubjective reality that changed dramatically during the same period, depending on the stories people told and believed about bitcoin. ([Location 840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=840)) - All human political systems are based on fictions, but some admit it, and some do not. Being truthful about the origins of our social order makes it easier to make changes in it. If humans like us invented it, we can amend it. ([Location 1015](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1015)) - Note: reminds me of Sylvia Winter's idea of economic Man as a story we can re-write - Lists and stories are complementary. National myths legitimize the tax records, while the tax records help transform aspirational stories into concrete schools and hospitals. ([Location 1119](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1119)) - The big problem with lists, and the crucial difference between lists and stories, is that lists tend to be far more boring than stories, which means that while we easily remember stories, we find it difficult to remember lists. This is an important fact about how the human brain processes information. ([Location 1124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1124)) - Unlike national poems and myths, which can be stored in our brains, complex national taxation and administration systems have required a unique nonorganic information technology in order to function. This technology is the written document. ([Location 1149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1149)) - Any kid can tell the difference between a friend and a bully. You know if someone shares their lunch with you or instead takes yours. But when the tax collector comes to take a cut from your earnings, how can you tell whether it goes to build a new public sewage system or a new private dacha for the president? It is hard to get all the relevant information, and even harder to interpret it. ([Location 1346](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1346)) - Whereas stories about heroes who confront monsters—from the Ramayana to Spider-Man—repackage the biological dramas of confronting predators and romantic rivals, the unique horror of Kafkaesque stories comes from the unfathomability of the threat. Evolution has primed our minds to understand death by a tiger. Our mind finds it much more difficult to understand death by a document. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1441)) - While in part 1 we are examining how mythology and bureaucracy have been essential for large-scale information networks, in part 2 we will see how AI is taking up the role of both bureaucrats and mythmakers. AI systems know how to find and process data better than flesh-and-blood bureaucrats, and AI is also acquiring the ability to compose stories better than most humans. ([Location 1537](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1537)) - We have now seen that information networks don’t maximize truth, but rather seek to find a balance between truth and order. Bureaucracy and mythology are both essential for maintaining order, and both are happy to sacrifice truth for the sake of order. What mechanisms, then, ensure that bureaucracy and mythology don’t lose touch with truth altogether, and what mechanisms enable information networks to identify and correct their own mistakes, even at the price of some disorder? ([Location 1542](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1542)) - At the heart of every religion lies the fantasy of connecting to a superhuman and infallible intelligence. This is why, as we shall explore in chapter 8, studying the history of religion is highly relevant to present-day debates about AI. In the history of religion, a recurrent problem is how to convince people that a certain dogma indeed originated from an infallible superhuman source. Even if in principle I am eager to submit to the gods’ will, how do I know what the gods really want? ([Location 1571](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1571)) - Religion wanted to take fallible humans out of the loop and give people access to infallible superhuman laws, but religion repeatedly boiled down to trusting this or that human. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CRP6SPL1&location=1591))