Well, the truth is I’m very scared for people to dislike me. I have conflict-avoidance.
Category Archive: Swedish
Once a discovery has been published, there is no way of un-publishing it.
I’ve done a lot of practical anthropology, living in villages with people and realizing how difficult it is to get out of poverty. When in poverty, people use their skill to avoid hunger. They can’t use it for progress.
Fame is a dangerous thing. It’s what the post-industrial society wants. They want fame and many followers on Twitter. But to really make the world understandable, that challenge is remaining.
Tinguely wasn’t the first artist to work with machines. But others were more interested in precision, in what machines are meant to do. What made him different was the random element. He introduced the mechanical accident. He was always interested in the immaterial, in sound, smoke, speed, light, shadows.
I am not an optimist. I’m a very serious possibilist. It’s a new category where we take emotion apart and we just work analytically with the world.
To get away from poverty, you need several things at the same time: school, health, and infrastructure – those are the public investments. And on the other side, you need market opportunities, information, employment, and human rights.
For healthy adult people, the really big thing we can foresee are ways of intervening in the ageing process, either by slowing or reversing it.
Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult.
While teaching a course on global development at Uppsala University in Sweden, I realized our students didn’t have a fact-based worldview. They talked about ‘we’ and ‘them.’ They thought there were two groups of countries: the Western world, with small families and long lives, and the Third World, with large families and short lives.