sourceType:: podcast author:: Daniel Schmachtenberger sourcePublication:: Rebel Wisdom ref:: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0v5RiMdSqwk noteTitle:: Rebel Wisdom - The War On Sensemaking V, Daniel Schmachtenberger
Rebel Wisdom - The War On Sensemaking V, Daniel Schmachtenberger
[[_nursery]]❌
if people can’t make sense of reality on their own, and can’t take the view of other people well (strawmanning vs steelmanning) there is no possibility for collective choicemaking (ie. functional government)
Requirements chain:
collective sense-making -> collective meaning-making -> collective conversation -> collective choice-making
collective sense-making: what’s actually going on. what we expect the outcome of a choice to be
collective meaning-making: what’s important. can we factor all of the focuses on different importances and come up with a common design solution for all of them. (rather than focusing on a subset of values and harming other, connected propositions).
start by taking the values that everyone holds and “is there a proposition that has a better chance of meeting these”?
does this government decay into less usefulness? or decay and reboot?
Information Commons / Epistemic Commons
commons: Shared access and shared stewardship.
information commons: the space of information out there about what is true and can inform our decisions. The basis of how anyone makes determinations. The quality of this (public education, media, news, etc) is requisite to the ongoing health of the republic.
same for markets - they also require hi-quality information commons in order for rational actors to make rational decisions.
this connects to marketing - if algorithmic control and media manipulation are high, then whoever does the better advertising and marketing wins out, rather than whoever has the better goods or services.
“marketlike systems require accurate and symmetrical information in order for people to make good choices.”
Coordination Systems
market-like
Distributed, bottom-up. agreements happen peer-to-peer, rather than systemically across the whole network.
government-like
religious, state, commons agreement, etc. top-down collective agreement structure.
culture
collective values held. determines what laws should be made. laws-are-codified-collective-ethics.
How these work together:
in a liberal democratic system, roughly: most innovation and resource/goods flow and allocation: market. to cut down on things like organ harvesting, clearcutting, organized crime, etc. Perverse Incentives: bound by the state via rule of law and monopoly on violence Justice IS and requires the monopoly on violence.
The state is there to check the market. The people bind and check the state, ensure there is no regulatory-capture. requires transparency and public engagement/civic understanding in order for the people to provide this service. The market checks the people - the accounting has to work: they can’t extract more than the the system is creating.
Again, this requires the capacity for the people as a whole to make good choices. and to be able to make sense of things. and communicate about it well.
Narrative warfare
move from broadcast-mediated to decentralized.
our global institutions evolved within the broadcast paradigm - all the way back to the printing press. it was succeptible to institutional capture, but at least everyone saw the same thing, even if they didn’t agree about it. There was some shared basis of exposure.
there’s also an extreme two-way communication now that wasn’t possible during broadcast - Facebook can know you better than your spouse or the NSA based on your interactions.
Facebook and Youtube are not tools, they are corporate interests that make money by selling advertising (by maximizing engagement).
in the sort of media landscape discussed here, it’s a lot easier for actors who want to do narrative warfare to do so.
Limbic Hijack
platforms curate what is stickiest. maximally sticky == appeals to dopaminurgic hijacks. Bias + limbic hijack - outrage, group identity, certainty.
This AI that tries to maximize stickiness is (game-theoretic-wise) more powerful than Deep Blue, ends up controlling what you believe - and you don’t even realize you’re playing.
Asymmetric information warfare on a scale that was never possible in the past.
statistically-accurate representations of what is going on are the antithesis of what these systems would want to show you. They want to show you a .0001% view of reality and make it seem like it’s totality. This increases your certainty, outrage and trauma as well as widens the gulf between people. The Other is strawmanned.
This is the opposite of everyone watching the Nightly News.
Globalization’s effect
forces people to deal with [[hyper-object | Hyper Objects]]❌ - the most important and most complex and most interconnected issues a global civilization needs to work with.
This helps break down epistemic certainty.
Information Warfare
In a polarized target nation, you can turn the enemy against itself by supporting the stuff the various tribes already believe.
Post-WW2
The peace in this period is unprecedented in the world. After getting nuclear-weapons, we realized we can no longer have wars between the major powers (because we could destroy the whole world). Instead we created a situation where the nations are so economically dependent on each other that they can’t go to war. Interconnected by very fragile. Cascade potential is very high.
The large countries are doing cyberwarefare, information warfare, economic warfare on each other. we’re not in peacetime, we’re in a multi-polar war fought in an unconventional way (non-kinetic).
see post-ww2
Dump / inbox:
The solution space requires understanding the problem space. A problem fully understood is half-solved. A problem not fully understood is essentially unsolvable.
people become epistemic nihilists, choose tribalism instead without realizing.
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