Yuval Noah Harari — "Fiction is not merely a distraction. It is what allows us to cooperate on a larg…"
Fiction is not merely a distraction. It is what allows us to cooperate on a large scale.
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More from Yuval Noah Harari
"The ability to tell fictional stories is what makes us human."
"Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing."
"We are on the verge of creating a new species: Homo deus."
"We are probably on the verge of a new phase of evolution, where we will be able to engineer ourselves."
"The future of humanity is not about robots taking over, but about algorithms knowing us better than we know ourselves."
About Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976)
Israeli historian whose Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2015) reframed big history for a mass audience and sold tens of millions of copies. Closely associated with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel author and Harari's clearest intellectual ancestor) and Steven Pinker (data-driven optimist contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and Maps of Meaning author — Peterson's Maps of Meaning argues that religious-mythological structure is the load-bearing architecture of human meaning — exactly the framing Harari's 'religion as useful fiction' thesis treats as historically transitory. The two are the largest-platform popular intellectuals of the 2010s with opposite views on whether religion encodes deep truth.