I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can't do this. That's the trade-off.
Interpretation
To study a subject thoroughly requires deep understanding, but writing on a broad topic like world history limits that depth.
Yuval Noah Harari highlights a fundamental dilemma in the pursuit of knowledge: while in-depth study of a subject is essential for true understanding, attempting to cover a vast topic, such as the entire history of the world, necessitates a more general approach. This trade-off between depth and breadth is a recurring challenge in education and scholarship, where the comprehensiveness of information can sometimes dilute the richness of individual insights.
In practice
In a lecture about the challenges of studying world history, this quote serves as a poignant reminder of the limitations of breadth versus depth.
We control the world basically because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. And if you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights.
I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe.
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'
Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
And if we must educate our poets and artists in science, we must educate our masters, labour and capital, in art.
It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.
Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.
There is no reason why an American scholar cannot by himself or herself develop an adequate understanding of another culture. And I don't find any reason to suppose that the birth within a culture automatically confers understanding.
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