daniel schmachtenberger

#top3 #person #metacrisis #alchemy #sensemaking #architect #research #🌱

about

personal website: https://civilizationemerging.com/

daniel is one of the deepest, most thoughtful and relevant thinkers i know. he does an incredible job assessing the underlying dynamics of our human predicament - the metacrisis - and pathways to avert existential & catastrophic risks of societal collapse and enable more beautiful ways forward.

favorite resources

playlist: i recommend starting out with my [favorites] - sensemaking playlist, in which he's heavily featured.

articles: all of the articles (8) available on his website are amazing, although dense. i recommend starting (counterintuitively) with the New Economic Series: Part 4 for a big picture view of what he's about.

key terms: systemic transition, wisdom, commons, design, sensemaking, strategy (...)

glossary: cultural materialism, tragedy of the commons, arms-race / race to the bottom, game-theoretical incentives & deterrents, jevonn's paradox, kleiber's law, (...)

see also: stephen reid's daniel schmachtenberger knowledgegraph

  1. my attempt at highlighting/consolidating a frame on generator functions:

generator functions:

additional layers of disconnection/non-intimacy:
—> value blindness (no metaphysics of value, society not oriented towards conscious evolution in any sense)
—> ecological/externalities blindness (economic system detached from our ecological substrate (self-organizing around profits [increasing accumulation, extraction, externalization of losses], unbounded optionality)
—> energy blindness & exponential technology accelerating resource depletion

  1. nate hagens attempting to consolidate challenges & pathways into a 3x3 grid

nate hagens' 3x3 grid

they ultimately brought it up and discussed elements in each of these, but didn't proceed in filling/developing it. it reminded me of josh williams' an introduction to the metacrisis presentation.

i find it relevant to continue coming back to this an d filling it as a map/radar, similar to the envisioning tech radar.

bend not break #4 notes:

how to start thinking about solutions:

  1. a principle/orientation that's important to me might not be for you. (steve jobs vs buffet) "different dharma, different passions, different typologies, different mind." still, we can/want to derive general principles as much as possible.

  2. well, you not only think about it, but you feel it. high-touch + scale/strategy. utilitarian + virtue ethics. both. psychospiritual transmutation process of pain/suffering is the only way forward.

"when we talk the metacrisis, you can't talk about climate change, the economy, US vs china power dynamics separately. they interaffect each other. as within, as without. you have to use all parts of yourself. intuition and intellect. passion and calm/dispassionate-ness. how do i cultivate all capacities of the self in service in all of the world?"

how to not think about solutions:

don't think about solutions too quickly. be trained to assess the uniqueness of this problem compared to the problems they've seen before. as complexity of the world increases, the likelihood of not being one of the previous seen things increases as well. "how do i assess the novelty of what's going on without letting my existing salience frameworks limit me?" the impulse to jump straight to solution is a discomfort with uncertainty, and doesn't want to not know what to do and feels like there's consequential stuff, but that makes it more likely for you to do the wrong thing.

  1. so: comfort with uncertainty.
  2. perverse incentives come in all kinds of metrics. if you have a job/goal to do X. due to our institutional choice architectures.
    "is there a mandate that i have that's too narrow to think/strategize well?"
    "people care about narrow things." -> "well, if you think you don't care about corals and oceans, you're just wrong. 'cause when they die, watch what happens to your life. if you think you don't care about fluorinated surfactants passing planetary boundaries or nuclear issues, you're wrong."

so you have to make sure that your choice making architectures are not so narrow that you can't actually think about what you're doing in context of everything else.

1st principle: you don't have to be trying to solve everything, but you do have to ensure that what you're doing here is considerate enough of the other areas that you're not causing externality there.

2nd principle: you can't think about the whole problem set of the world and then think about you as if you or any individual are going to be able to act in some way sufficient to the whole thing. you should care about the whole thing but then you should care about lots of people's activity and service of that.

so: how do you relate in network with everyone else?

there will be some people who are much more like, "Look, I can do shit. Tell me what to do. I can execute." And there'll be people who are like, "I don't know how to politically execute, I don't have good interpersonal skills. I'm a great researcher." In which case it's like, this is what I mean about typologies. Great, figure out where you actually can work your ass off all the time because you're enlivened by it, you enjoy it. So you can really excel and develop novel capacities and be in partnership with other people to different capabilities.

how to avoid externalities:

questions to start thinking about it: Daniel's list of questions

e.g.: where in the system are there perverse incentives? (financial, status, cover your ass incentive that's not aligned with doing the maximally good thing for the whole. not in a partisan way, but in all directions.)
"Can we use law to bind this? Can we use collective value system and a cultural forcing function to bind this? Can we use a different profit motive and make a healthier profit motive where people are willing to pay for a more expensive thing because it's better?"

physical and psycho-social externalities:

  1. upstream/downstream externalities
  2. 1st-order effect (on a small number of variables) -> we need to think through 2nd, 3rd, 4th-order effects on a large number of variables. [talk w/ more people, w/ more perspectives]

try to do it as best as you can, knowing that there will be things falling out of your attempts.

"we can't keep externalizing harm with exponential tech", "so we have to get much more fucking careful on the risk-reward side, and get less reward-seeking and willing to externalize risk as a whole society if we're gonna make it. we have to get much more conscious of that."

(...) - stopped taking notes at 40 min