Daniel Schmachtenberger is a fascinating thinker.
I’d personally describe him as a holistic systems thinker focused on civilization risk and design.
Eric Weinstein describes Daniel this way:
“Daniel in particular favors the wisdom and design branch of the human fate decision tree … Daniel is searching for something like the wisdom needed to reengineer a non-rivalrous or anti-rivalrous society to live in harmony with its newfound god-like powers. Sometimes the search for a so-called ‘escape through wisdom’ goes under the name of Game B.”
Note: Premium Members have access to my full synthesis of Daniel’s thinking:
đź”’ Daniel Schmachtenberger Synthesis: How to Think Holistically about Civilization
Post Contents: Click a link to jump to a section below
- Who is Daniel Schmachtenberger?
- Human Evolution & Tool-Making
- Game Theory & Power Dynamics
- Exponential Technology & Self-Termination
- Disinformation & New Warfare
- Paradigm Shift & Path Forward
- Sense-Making, Meaning-Making, & Choice-Making
- Sovereignty & Self-Determination
- Psycho-Spiritual Development & Wisdom
Who is Daniel Schmachtenberger?
Here is Daniel’s latest bio:
“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.”
I also like one of his previous bios that was listed on his blog Civilization Emerging:
- “Daniel Schmachtenberger’s central interest is long term civilization design: developing better collective capacities for sense-making and meaning-making, to inform higher quality choice-making … towards a world commensurate with our higher values and potentials … Advancing those models for long term viability, along with advancing the capacities for sense-making, design, and coordination needed to support the necessary nearer-term transitional and protective work, is Daniel’s mission and focus.”
Civilization Emerging covers a wide variety of topics:
- Collective intelligence; information ecology; antifragility; incentives; virtues; technologies (unprecedented, complex, consequential, exponential); globalized civilization coordination; power dynamics; avoiding collapse; long-term planning and life enhancement; and more
Daniel’s educational and professional backgrounds:
- “What a good civilization is, and how to improve things in our world, I’d say was my interest since I was young and kind of the central line.”
- Daniel has an eclectic educational background mostly from outside of institutional settings (natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy). He was homeschooled in a way that people today would call “unschooling” — no fixed curriculum, so he got to study what he wanted.
- His parents were “educational philosophers intuitively.” They had intuitions about things that were wrong with society that were related to how we develop humans. The family was called the “Guinea Pig Four” (parents plus Daniel and his brother).
- Daniel says he would take his own questions and interests and facilitate his own thinking on it—leading to the interconnectedness of disciplines. Instead of breaking a kid’s interests in life, you facilitate deepened interest—and people tend to become good at things they really care about.
- Daniel has done work in functional medicine and biotech, education and human development, and advised private and public sector leaders on how to address complex scenarios.
35+ Deep Daniel Schmachtenberger Quotes on Civilization Design, Game Theory, Sense-Making, Sovereignty, & More
On Human Evolution & Tool-Making:
“The primary thing that’s particularly unique adaptively about homo sapiens is our capacity for techne—our capacity for tool. That’s social tools like language and democracy but also physical tools.”
“Our capacity for abstraction leading to tool-making like that made us increase our predatory capacity radically faster than the environment could become resilient to our increased predatory capacity.”
“You could say that what humans selected for are genetics selected for memetics—our genetics selected for radical neuroplasticity and the capacity to have much more significant software upgrades that could change our capacity without needing hardware upgrades.”
“The distinction of technology creation or tool-making as a process by which new stuff comes to exist as opposed to evolution as a process by which new stuff comes to exist is at the heart of a lot of the things that I think about.”
“Our technology and capital have created thousands, millions, billions of times asymmetry in power. And thats not an evolutionary thing. Which means that it actually broke evolution in the way that we think of it. Evolution depends upon asymmetries of power.”
On Game Theory & Power Dynamics:
“A lot of people when they think about what’s underneath all the problems in the world, they start to think about social architectures. One of the social architectures is this game theoretic race to the bottom type scenario. A very small number … can create a game dynamic that then everyone else is obligated to not just play but try to play to win.”
“Power-seeking psychologies that don’t have psychology that restrains the use and abuse of power get more power … Ones who are either less oriented towards it or don’t want to use it harmfully create bases to have less of it, so the world ends up being run by sociopaths.”
“The dominant system ends up eating psychology and saying that the psychology that supports the dominant system is healthy psychology and anything that is dissenting to it is not healthy. It ends up eating spirituality, and virtue, and ethics, and academia, and whatever to basically say, ‘The behaviors that support this system are good, so the thinking that supports those behaviors is good, and anything that’s dissenting is bad.'”
“The perverse incentive in the economic systems is conditioning value systems in people. And whoever does better at getting the value systems that go along with the economic incentive system, will end up getting more power within the system and thus continuing to evolve the system in the direction that benefits them.”
On Exponential Technology & Self-Termination:
“Rivalrous game dynamics multiplied by exponential tech end up self-terminating.”
“We have been employing more and more powerful technology to play rivalrous games. That means more and more potent warfare, more and more potent environmental extraction, and more and more potent information tech that can do narrative and information warfare (narrative control).”
“Exponential tech increases our leverage so much that individuals and small groups have the capacity to influence the rest of the human space but also the biospace in a way that nothing else has—so there is no example anywhere in biology of a system that has the kind of asymmetry relative to its whole environment that we have.”
“Exponential tech is inexorable. We cannot put it away. So, we either figure out anti-rivalry, or we go extinct. The human experiment comes to a completion. That’s the core thing.”
“As technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods, you have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that or you self-destruct.”
“We are getting an exponential increase in how powerful the choices we make can be. And, that’s a good way to think about technology, as a lever on our choice-making.”
On Disinformation & New Warfare:
“Peoples’ minds are the battlefield, the treasure that is trying to be achieved, and also the weapons.”
“Cognitively we’re not eating salads and healthy things. Cognitively we’re just eating french fries.”
“The kinds of AIs that optimize your news feed are higher power AIs than the AIs that beat Kasparov at chess. Kasparov is far better at chess than you are at controlling your attention, and he also knew he was playing a game.”
“Strategy 101: If you aren’t factoring counter-response … you aren’t doing strategy, you’re just being emotionally hijacked into playing a game for reasons you don’t even understand. If you aren’t factoring second and third-order consequences, you’re probably making the world worse.”
“We are in World War III currently. It’s not a kinetic war (e.g. bullets), it’s an unconventional war … 99% of war isn’t kinetic, it’s economic warfare, it’s narrative/info warfare, it’s cyber warfare, it’s political/diplomatic/supply chain/trade warfare … and kinetic is the last part that will back it up.”
On the Paradigm Shift & Path Forward:
“There’s a path where we can make it, but it’s not a given at all that we do. Rather than ask whether we do or not, how do I help determine that we do? … That’s what being an imaginal cell in the transition from caterpillar to butterfly really means—taking some empowered responsibility for being someone who is recognizing that you can’t just run the instruction manual that was given historically and the new instruction manual doesn’t exist yet.”
“The paradigm shift is basically everything. We need new systems of governance that are not any system of governance the world has ever done so far. They are systems of how do we individually and collectively make sense of what’s going on, make sense of what we actually value, and how those values can be synergistically satisfied rather than in a theory of tradeoffs with each other. We need totally new systems of economics, we need totally new systems of education, all the way down to at an individual level, a new basis for identity, values, our own individual sense-making.”
“I see the possibility for a steady-state population that is within the carrying capacity of a closed-loop materials economy but that is fueled by renewable energy … We can have an economy that’s continuously getting better but not by getting bigger.”
“The few times that a republic or a democracy emerged … they emerged following a period of a cultural enlightenment for that culture … a very high value on classical education for everyone (history, philosophy, formal logic, rhetoric, the arts) so that everyone can have a sense of how to know the true and the good and the beautiful—an integrated sense of those. Understand what types of systems worked and didn’t work in the past … If everyone can basically sense base reality on their own well (which has to be trained), and then there was also the value of the Socratic dialogue (everybody is trained to take every perspective … If you have a bunch of people who can all understand reality on their own well, and they can have high quality conversations and take each others’ perspective … those people can start to have the kinds of conversations to share sense-making that leads to being able to make collective choices.”
On Sense-Making, Meaning-Making, & Choice-Making:
“The antecedents of choice-making: collective sense-making (what’s actually going on, and what do we anticipate the effects of a particular action to be), collective meaning-making (what’s important), and collective conversation.”
“Sense-making is about the exploration into what is real, and what is meaningful is bound to what is real.”
“Why don’t we have group sense-making? Because you have a self-perpetuating system that includes the self-perpetuation of the memes that support the system.”
“Our ability to do choice-making well depends on our ability to sense-make well, which is why controlling peoples’ sense-making is the heart of the war that’s happening.”
“We’re making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense-making to inform those choices, which is kind of running increasingly fast through the woods increasingly blind.”
“Collective choice-making requires collective sense-making and collective perspective-taking—I have to be able to understand how other people are seeing things to then be able to work on strategies that are effective together.”
On Sovereignty & Self-Determination:
“To what degree am I a sovereign, self-determining agent, and to what degree am I thinking I’m a sovereign, self-determining agent that is actually being influenced in ways I don’t even recognize?”
“As people are seeking to become more self-determined, the first thing is to recognize how much you are not self-determined, to recognize how much the information streams coming into your eyes and ears and who you’re around influences and start changing that. One of the best acts of self-determination is to change the things other than you that are influencing you.”
“This is actually a very valuable thing in personal development: taking the time to very deeply and earnestly inquire into your motive. I’m wanting to develop in this way. Why?”
“What do I actually care about, and why do I care about it? And, how do I reflect on what I believe to be both true and meaningful right now? And, what is right action factoring what I understand to be true and what I understand to be meaningful? … And, how certain am I on what I think is true? And, how biased am I on what I think is meaningful? And, can I refine those as well?”
“Being rational is starting with ‘I don’t know,’ let’s go through the process, let’s try all the hypotheses, what is the evidence for all the hypotheses. Rationalizing is I jump straight to belief and now I’m going to try to create backfilled rationale for it, and pretend that that’s how I got there.”
“Recognizing how big of an infinity the unknowable is, everyone has to make very deep friends with uncertainty to not be mentally ill.”
On Psycho-Spiritual Development & Wisdom:
“Figuring out anti-rivalry is a psycho-spiritual process inside of ourselves. Can we pay attention to our emotions and triggers that hijack us from sovereignty?”
“Wisdom is not algorithmic, and cannot be made algorithmic. You can’t have an if-this-then-that algorithm that actually equals wisdom.”
“Buddhist ‘desire’ is the source of all suffering. Western ‘desire’ is the source of all creativity and goodness, and we’re here to be creators. Those are really different models about the nature of desire … something we kind of have to wrestle with.”
“I think what happens is people realize that everything they got dies with them—the way I touched the world continues … There is actually only a kind of self-transcendence and permanence in the way that I touch the world … I’m proposing that there is something like spiritual growth that is actually necessary for civilization to make it … coming from a place of wholeness and actual love for the beauty of life and the desire to have their life be meaningful to Life. That my life ends but Life with a capital-L doesn’t end and that Life starts to be central to my awareness more than my life is, and my life becomes meaningful in its coupling to Life.”
“I want to be able to enjoy the beauty of life as fully as I can now, I also want to be able to add to the beauty of life for other people, I also want to deepen my capacity to experience the beauty of life and add to it. Being, doing, and becoming. How do we optimize for a virtuous cycle between the modes of being, doing, and becoming individually and collectively?”
“Why is it worth doing anything? It’s worth doing anything because I’m going to be adding to the beauty and meaningfulness of reality that is experienceable by other people.”
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