Are You Resinating With Other People Around Critical Topics?

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I think there are a lot of people like at least in my weird corner of the irnet and the sin of sub cultures that i participate in who are kind of like looking to you for answers, solutions and the way forward. I've listened to all of your podcast all the appearances youve made. I think i've read everything on civilization emerging. And then you have been able to bring a number of frameworks together that seem like they are adding useful clarity to the ability to make sense of the world. Ah, and so in so far as some of those things that resinate with me are resinating with other people, i feel happy about that. So even though i have no idea

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.