- On a path to thousand dreams, we are looking for reality.
Prologue
- spell: sort
- to heed: écouter
- to summon: appeler
- hubris: démesure
- deluded: qui se fait des idées
- delusional: délirant
- to posit: avancer
- deceitful: déloyal
- to waft: flotter
- to pilfer: voler
- momentous: historique
- to spew: cracher
- peppered: poivré
- to conjure: faire apparaître
- clump: motte
- elusive: insaisissable
- ploy: stratagème
- staple: de base
- to plague: ronger
- a modicum: un minimum
- unfathomable: énigmatique, incompréhensible
- Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.
- Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.
- Science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest.
Part 1 Human Networks
Chapter 1 What Is Information?- oblivious: inconscient
- mishap: incident
- falsehood: mensonge
- hallowed: sacré
- tellingly: efficacement
- to squirm: se tortiller
- awe: émerveillement
- stirring: émouvant
- overblown: exagéré
- quaint: au charme désuet
- nexus: connexion
- tattered: en lambeaux
- delusional: délirant
- to tilt: pencher
- Pro-British Jews living in Palestine set up a spy network code-named NILI to inform the British about Ottoman troop movements.
- This accurately pointed to a certain aspect of reality, but it neglected other aspects.
- Ultimately, each individual has a difference perspective of the world, shaped by the intersection of different personalities and life histories.
- We can expect the flow of information to expose the occasional lies and errors and to ultimately provide us with a more truthful understanding of the world. On this crucial point, this book strongly disagrees with the naive view.
- The Bible makes many serious errors in its description of both human affairs and natural processes.
- Information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn't. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic.
- "How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?" then the more crucial questions are "How well does it connect people?" What new network does it create?"
Chapter 2 Stories: Unlimited Connections
- to concur: être d'accord
- berate: réprimander
- enmeshed: emmêlé
- recount: raconter
- winged: ailé
- saviour: saveur
- to mince: hacher
- kin: famille
- hurtling: avancer à toute allure
- ache: douleur
- oxymoron: exemple : silence assourdissant
- utterly: complètement
- eel: anguille
- to enshrine: conserver précieusement
- mesmerizing: fascinnant
- avert: éviter
- foster: encourager
- spell: sort
- unblemished: sans tâches
- to covet: convoiter
- gambit: phrase d'ouverture
- What holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money and nations.
- Fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated.
- The truth is often painful and disturbing.
- They just had to know the same story.
- The 8 billion members of the global trade network are connected by stories about currencies, corporations and brand.
- The social media accounts are usually run by a team of experts, and every image and word is professionally crafted and curated to manufacture what is nowadays called a brand.
- To brand a product means to tell a story about that product, which may have little to do with product's actual qualities but which consumers nevertheless learn to associate with the product.
- In 2020, Laszlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins.
- 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.
- Intersubjective things like laws, gods and currencies are extremely powerful within a particular information network and utterly meaningful outside it.
- The need to balance truth and order more urgent.
Chapter 3 Documents: The Bite of the Paper Tigers
- bewailing: déplorer
- stirring: émouvant
- heart-wrenching: déchirant
- eschew: éviter
- dryly: d'un ton sec
- mesmerise: fasciner
- garland: enguirlander
- weave : tisser
- tally: compte
- foraging: cueillette
- forager: glaneur
- purview: portée
- alloted: alloué
- siring: reproducteur
- offspring: progéniture
- straddle: enfourcher
- to dispose: se débarrasser
- outbreak: épidémie
- cesspit: fosse d'aisance
- loophole: faille
- conscript: appeler
- bestow: décerner
- cub: petit
- chick: poussin
- cockroach: cafard
- upended: renversé
- slumber: sommeiller
- uphill: ardu
- plan: élément
- benevolence: acte de bienveillance
- The dollar, the pound sterling and the bitcoin are all brought by persuading people to believe a story, and tales told by bankers, finance ministers and investment gurus raise or lower their value.
- Tel Aviv : a loose Hebrew translation of "old New Land"
- Stories are a highly efficient vehicle for communicating factual, conceptual, emotional, and tacit information.
- If your dog eats a hundred-dollar bill, those hundred dollars cease to exist.
- Unlike bacteria, viruses aren't single-cell organisms.
- Viruses don't eat or metabolize, and cannot reproduce by themselves. They are tiny packet of genetic code, which are able to penetrate cells, hijack their cellular machinery and instruct them to produce more copies of that alien genetic code. The new copies burst out of the cell to infect and hijack more cells, which is how the alien code turns viral.
- It takes a minute to tweet allegations of bias, fraud or corruption, and many weeks of arduous work to prove or disprove them.
- In bureaucratic systems, power often comes from understanding how to manipulate obscure budgetary loopholes and from knowing your way around labyrinths of offices, committees and subcommittees.
- Just then the rebels capture a clerk and accuse him of being able to write and read.
- Many rebels might have been illiterate, but they knew that without the documents the bureaucratic machine couldn't function.
- In our family it became a sacred duty to preserve documents. Bank statements, electricity bills, expired student cards, letters from the municipality - if it had an official stamp on it, it would be filled in one of the many folders in our cupboard. You never knew which of these documents might one day save your life.
- AI is also acquiring the ability to compose stories better than most humans.
- We have now seen that information networks don't maximise truth, but rather seek to find a balance between truth and order.
- Pour remplacer mes chaussures de course ON running qui ne m'ont pas convaincues, j'ai de nouveau acheté des Hoka Clifton 9 couleur Orange :
- Taille : 44 2/3
- Poids : 238g
- Drop : 5 mm
- Première sortie aujourd'hui avec les semelles orthopédiques de juillet 2024. On verra si le mal aux cervicales réapparait.
