Rational Optimism: a conversation between Matt Ridley and Jordan Peterson

It does not matter if you win or loose a certain game, it matters how you play the game.

"Because life is a never-ending series of diverse games and your goal, if you want to be a winner, is to be invited to play as many games as possible. And that means you need to have a morality that works across the set of possible games and that has to trump the morality of winning a single game." - Jordan Peterson

Sex is how genes shuffle. It's how we get diversity & evolution.

Like so, trade allows ideas from a community to be shared by a community elsewhere. "I can sell you this gadget, you can sell me that gadget."

Trade is not just about material but also intellectual exchanges. It's why we have fertile conversations.

The idea of the noble savage is attributed to the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He believed the original “man” was free from sin or the concept of right & wrong, and that those deemed “savages” were not brutal but noble.

He believed humans are inherently good and that the social institutions have made us malevolent. Naturally good but corrupted by culture. 

Matt Ridley, makes the case that while there are many examples of social species, none of them show the levels of reciprocity the humans show. No species is good at "I scratch your back you scratch mine". This evolved into trade & we are sophisticated enough to pay for debt in currency other than that in which it was accrued: "I give you water, you give me food".

This insight aligns with Adam Smith's argument from the wealth of Nation that the trader does not trade our of benevolence but self-interest. And that self-interest is what helps a society thrive.

Is a strategy in which each participant in a cooperation-allowing competition follows a course of action consistent with his opponent's previous turn: For example, if provoked, a player subsequently responds with retaliation; if unprovoked, the player cooperates.

It states that a person is more successful if they cooperate with another person. Implementing a tit-for-tat strategy occurs when one agent cooperates with another agent in the very first interaction and then mimics their subsequent moves. 

Morality, according to Adam Smith, is not a set of rules we are thought by priests.... but a calculation to which actions will allow us to succeed in the society we live in. 

200 yrs ago we settled disputes in duels, we now have come up with better methods. Thus we evolved our morality by constantly asking ourselves "In this society what will give me the best rewards, knowing how everyone is behaving?"

The meaning of the book is a complex consequence of the knowledge that's held by the reader and the knowledge that's implied by the author. So that means that no books are the same for 2 readers. 

Not to say that, because understanding is never the same, we can deny any meaning ever existing in the first place ... as post-modernists do by over-extending the observation. 

Take the making of a pencil: There is no person in the world who knows how to make a pencil. The person who works in the pencil factory does not know how to cut a tree and the cutter does not know to work in a mine.

Our knowledge sits in between minds, not the mega mind. We have an invisible cloud of knowledge pushing us forward.