The way Daniel speaks reminds me of Terence McKenna, before they address the topic of conversation they go on historical tangents that transform apparently detached topics into contextual and relevant information for us viewers. Fascinating perspectives on so many things that holistically can be combatted by coordination and incentives. Coordination is such a difficult problem, even coordinating amongst 20 people is difficult. Today we're dealing with the byproducts of once-functional systems at scale, some of them existential threats. Daniel is a true Renaissance man.
Daniel is one of the best thinker of our times. If only people were as interested in sensemaking than they are in distracting themselves away from disturbing parts of reality, we would have much more chances as a species. Getting people to realize that they actually need to care, that is the challenge.
1:13:16 the "capitalism is not business" stuff from this point on needs to be transcribed and written in big letters on the sides of buildings. Eminently quotable.
Germany “voting green” and Germany reducing their nuclear energy production are not reconcilable. This is not specific to Germany. Of the many failures of the environmental movement, rejection of nuclear energy is perhaps the greatest. This is also representative of the broader problems of having informed people who can make sense of the world. I’m highlighting one brief, negative aspect here for which I apologize. This is a fantastic podcast and Germany is a fantastic country.
In a world with no earthquakes or landslides and sea levels that remain constant, a world with unfailing technology and no human error, and a way of effectively disposing of the waste for as long as the waste lasts, fission power stations could be an environmentally responsible energy source.
Edited transcript of the bit after 1:13:10 “…It’s very important to understand that capitalism is not business. It’s not the same thing. Business was pre-capitalism: business was the idea of “how do i make a good or service that people actually want based on real demand, and how do i make the best good or service at the best value so that a hopefully rational person will make a good choice, and in doing so, I get more money through production only of real value of a good at a good value, in which case i'm a good steward of that money because i'm going to continue to produce real value”. That's kind of like a very brief version of randian market ideology. It’s not capitalism. Capitalism is once you start doing that and you have a big pool of capital, and you realize that compound interest makes money faster and financial services of various kinds make money faster than the good or service because the good or service has a cost of goods sold and the money has an exponential return on it. The other thing doesn't have an exponential return. Capitalism is about stewarding pools of capital to create more capital and you know the saying that dumb criminals break laws, smart criminals make laws. Well who makes laws? Lobbyists! Who pays for them? People with money! Why do they do it? Because they can make more money if they do the thing. And what do politicians do after they stop being politicians? Well they're still economic actors! Oh great, so if I have more money I can also change law in the direction of the interest. So capitalism works to where we can also create media companies, we can also fund certain kinds of media, we can also fund certain kinds of research - so what people even think is true is based on the shit that actually got funded. So, to increase those pools of capital i can pull on the levers of affecting policy, affecting media zeitgeist and style and like that affecting even research and the fundamental ideas of what we think is true. I can affect all of them, ultimately to be increasing optionality and power. That that is not a system that is meritocratic where the more money you have is a sign of the more good you did, no - it's not! That's utter gibberish. I can make money through production, I can also make money through extraction, and as behavioural economics showed, it's very easy to compel people to not be rational actors. So i can make money through producing valuable things or i can make money through producing addictive shit and stuff that drives FOMO (fear of missing out) that clearly makes everyone's life worse, and given that the supply side if it's a million dollar, billion dollar, hundred billion dollar organization has way more coordinated power than the individual purchaser does, it's an asymmetric war to influence them where demand isn't driving supply; supply is manufacturing demand. Well the whole basis of the market area just broke: as soon as you can manufacture demand the idea that it is a collective intelligence system is broken. It's not a collective intelligence system now it's a paperclip maximizer it is now an autopoietic process for converting people and the world into capital.
My daughter is 17 with a prep school education and going off to college next year. She desires to pursue a pathway similar to Daniel’s. How does she best get there? Thank you!
All liberation movements might be seen as rebellion against systems of governance that in their efforts to manage their populations failed to provide a decent life for the critical mass. Over the course of time governments have learned how to better use carrots and sticks to manage expectations but environmental degradation and shifting geopolitical power create additional pressures not so easily managed. One might reasonably wonder the extent to which an information approach will be sufficient. Nevertheless - excellent presentation, thank you.
Agreed. The "IDW", to me, seem to be fluent with discussing that which I imagine would be the topics of conversation among the Jason scientists, who were recently rendered less formally influential to the practitioners of governance in the west.
Why don't we see Schmachtenberger debating astute big-name right-wing sociopolitical pundits? Probably because his flimsy ideas and ideology would get shredded by them.
Which of his ideas do you find flimsy? Pick one you find most distasteful and what idea would you substitute? And who are 1-3 of the big-name right-wing pundits you're referring to. I ask out of genuine curiosity. I find Shmachtenberger's logic and framing compelling, but I'm open to being wrong. Thank you.
@@nicolashofer5743 thanks Nicolas. Indeed they have 0 of the most most advanced nodes.I don't think china has the 'majority of lithography' mature/older nodes either. I would say they do have a sizeable portion though.
Absolutely great conversation Mariana! Really appreciated your questions and the gracious work you are doing for a world in Critical Need! I absolutely love the Consilience Project and Daniel Schmachtenberger is one of my ALL TIME HEROS! I am building a project with Singularity University in Costa Rica right now that is centered around answering these types of questions in real life in a place of thriving natural intelligence. Would love to show you what we are working on some time. Blessings indeed. 🙌🤩🙏
Can't get enough of Daniel's conversations and thoroughly enjoyed your conversation with him Mariana, thank you for posting and best wishes for your future uploads!
"civilization systems as coodination systems" 36:44 Daniel: "civilizations fail either [...] in the direction of chaos OR the way they bring about the order is imposed." That is our very western (national) legal systems at work: there is order ("public law", "state") and chaos ("private law", "market") that are two fundamentally opposed thought forms mediated _in law_ by what is called constitutional law. This can be done in a multitude of ways and works sometimes better (Daniel: "nordic countries") sometimes worse. So the idea we have to come up with something completely new may still be true, but the fundamental problem of the public law private law dialectic _has_ been solved in the past in constitutional law, albeit so far on national state levels only and to varying degrees of sophistication. Today we have the challenge at hand that private law priciples ("contracts", enforceable by conflict of laws) operate _internationally_ with no public law available that could order the system. At the latest with free floating exchange rates the international system became a privately dominated system (chaos) - heavily dependent on state actors (order) in case of emergency (e.g. during and after the Great Recession). P.S.: the order by public law _is_ imposed. It is not a choice to pay taxes. It is public law. Imposed order. But it is not arbitrarily imposed order. It is mediated by constitutional law how exactly the imposition of the order can happen.
Daniel starts with foreseeing problems that are caused by current simplistic goals. His solution is to replace those goals with holistic goals that are generated by collective sensemaking. But I would say that there can be no collective sensemaking until we deeply question our motivations and assumptions. For example, Facebook owners need to ask themselves if profit fulfils their deepest motivation and whether money can bring reliable happiness.
Last time I checked krill, ants and termites all individually represented more biomass than all human biomass combined, possibly even many times over. Maybe we're not plainly too many, but maybe we behave too stupidly and think too simplistically on average?
22:59 is where Daniel reveals the shallowness of his thinking in regards to anarchic and market-based societal models. He missed the only real solution long ago for failure to investigate it deeply enough, and has been chasing his tail for years ever since, trying to conceptualize a contrived form of democratic statism that purportedly (though impossibly) overcomes the knowledge problems, incentive problems, and public choice problems inherent to political states and non-universalized systems of ethics.
I don't hear Schmachtenburger as saying that the state is the solution - but that a "left to it" market is not. Dorito, I'm interested, what is it that you hint at as the "only real solution," and please could you explain the assumptions you feel Schmachtenburger has wrong? Thanks
@@jonsparkes2550 Anyone talking about "one real solution" obviously has no idea how the world works. There's always a spectrum of possible solutions to choose to go in a certain direction and on top of that many directions the world can go towards.
