Are You Optimistic That We're Going to Be Able to Help the Homeless?

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Daniel: I'm having the similar experience that i often have when i listen to you speak, where there's a way in which i get what you're saying on both an intuitive and a conceptual level. Most of us have a kind of learned helplessness right where we really want to help the homeless person that we're walking past. And so i start putting blinders on, and i start numbing in a particular way because i can only care about stuff i can do stuff about. So both my impossibility to respond and my impossibly to even make sense of adequately will, my impossibily to respond will have me turn sense making off. Also, my inability to even makesense

This week I'm speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.

Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.

Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.

We talk about the current state of the phase shift, whether we are past the point of no return for social collapse, Daniel’s three generator functions of existential risk, the definition of an adequate social architecture that avoids existential risk, how technology creates asymmetric advantage that debases the planetary life support system, why we need to create technology that leads to ‘metastability’, the pollution of the epistemic commons, why we need to define problems in a comprehensive way where the solutions don’t create worse problems, the vows Daniel made as a teenager, what progress is being made at solving the generator functions of existential risk, the auto-poetic nature of trauma, and the necessity of a mature relationship between certainty and uncertainty.