Are the Patterns of Human Behavior Increasing Catastrophic Risk?

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The major tragedy of the commons, issues like climate change and over fishing and dead zones in the oceans and by a diversity loss, we haven't been able to solve those either. And so rather than just think about this is like an overwhelming number of totally separate issues, why are the patterns of human behavior increasing catastrophic risk? Well, are their underlying patterns that we could think of as generator functions of the catastrophic risk, generator functions of our inability to solve them? That if were to identify those and work at that level, we could solve all the expressions or symptoms. If we don't work at thatlevel, we might not be able to solve any of them.

We’ve explored many different problems on Your Undivided Attention — addiction, disinformation, polarization, climate change, and more. But what if many of these problems are actually symptoms of the same meta-problem, or meta-crisis? And what if a key leverage point for intervening in this meta-crisis is improving our collective capacity to problem-solve?

Our guest Daniel Schmachtenberger guides us through his vision for a new form of global coordination to help us address our global existential challenges. Daniel is a founding member of the Consilience Project, aimed at facilitating new forms of collective intelligence and governance to strengthen open societies. He's also a friend and mentor of Tristan Harris.

This insight-packed episode introduces key frames we look forward to using in future episodes. For this reason, we highly encourage you to listen to this unedited version along with the edited version.

We also invite you to join Daniel and Tristan at our Podcast Club! It will be on Friday, July 9th from 2-3:30pm PDT / 5-6:30pm EDT. Check here for details.