Jacob Rosenberg

@jacobrosenberg.bsky.social

12044 Followers 664 Following

Features Editor @nymag.com, jacob.rosenberg@nymag.com || former Mother Jones, Arkansas Times || "As for the scoffers, He scoffs at them"

The challenge will be to figure out how to subsidize human interaction. I think maybe one way to reward organizations and people who do something positive for human interaction is that they should all get subsidized some number of pennies per minute when one human is looking into another human’s eyes. So if you set up an archery club where you all go out drinking afterward and laughing and looking into each other’s eyes, that should be your economic reward. I don’t know if you remember the first time you ever looked into a potential girlfriend’s eyes and you sort of felt your heart flutter. A very large fraction of our brains is dedicated to recognizing the faces and analyzing the emotions of our tribe members. So I think that if you want to figure out how to make humans happy, look at the tribal societies we evolved in and try to reproduce that in a way that doesn’t involve having raids on your nearby tribes. — As told to Simon van Zuylen-Wood