BETTERNESS

///////////137 MILLION CENTURIES SINCE BB



////////////Steven Weinberg once ended a book on this note: "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.


////////////YR OF PROTEST AND REBELLION-SIMILAR TO 1970


///////////NARROW CONCERNS NOT THE THE GREATER OTHER CAUSES



///////////////////......With his concept of the "noosphere," the "thinking envelope of the Earth," Teilhard even anticipated in a vague way the Internet -- more than a decade before the invention of the microchip.


////////////////.....They made a basic distinction between "zero-sum" games and "non-zero-sum" games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant's gain is the other's loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player's gain needn't be bad news for the other(s). Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players' interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when the three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to figure out how to get their stranded spaceship back to earth, they were playing an utterly non-zero-sum game, because the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good.)
Back in the real world, things are usually not so clear-cut. A merchant and a customer, two members of a legislature, two childhood friends sometimes -- but not always -- find their interests overlapping. To the extent that their interests do overlap, their relationship is non-zero-sum; the outcome can be win-win or lose-lose, depending on how they play the game.


///////////////.......Human history, after all, is notoriously messy.



///////////////.........Neither biological evolution nor human history is a smooth, steady process. Both pass through thresholds; they can leap from one equilibrium to a new, higher-level equilibrium. To some people, the current era has the aura of a threshold; it has that unsettling, out-of-control feeling that can portend a major shift. Technological, geopolitical, and economic change seem ominously fast, and the fabric of society seems somehow tenuous.


//////////////RD BK NONZERO LOGIC OF HUMAN DESTINY R WRIGHT


////////////////.....The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

- Mortimer Adler -



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