A Loving Introduction To Daniel Schmachtenberger
A Good Dude Who Makes Sense
I’d love to introduce you to Daniel, one of my favourite people I’ve never met! I think he’s very much worth hanging out with, but is a little shy and sometimes needs a warm introduction.
Fair warning - Daniel, and therefore this post, deals with rot, suffering, and potential extinction on a societal level. If you’re not in a place to receive that today, totally cool - come back some other time! And with that, some context.
Polycrises and Molochs
Things aren’t going so good! I don’t mean that problems persist in the world - they always have and will. I mean that our systems for solving these problems are now threatening both the continuation and meaningfulness of our existence.
We don’t just have one crisis either. Climate change, resource/energy scarcity, ecosystem destruction, runaway AI, fragile/inscrutable global supply chains, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, pandemics, etc - they all independently threaten us, but also interact in uncomfortable ways!
For example, resource/land scarcity invites city life as a solution, but that makes us more vulnerable to the spread of pandemics due to population density. The complex, fragile, inscrutable morass of our global supply chain could be combatted by having countries reduce their economic interdependence, yet that interdependence is currently vital for maintaining peace between nuclear powers. Each of these problems is independently difficult and multifaceted and can feel hopeless, and yet we must find solutions that balance them all, threading the needle of our times.
This problem of problems has in recent years often been termed the “metacrisis” or “polycrisis”.
But even assuming we find such solutions - which many brilliant, dedicated people the world over are pushing towards - it would seem that the technologies and societies we’ve developed are intent on reducing our ability to coordinate and imagine. We allow technologies such as social media and now AI to run roughshod over our attention spans, our empathy, our mental health, any shared sense of truth, and our connection to nature and each other. Far from freeing us to imagine and work on a better future, our economic system manufactures both material and artificial scarcity in the vast majority of the population, reducing our sensitivity, capacity to think beyond ourselves in the near term, and inducing reactionary behaviour and policy. Our current forms of large-scale organization - governments and corporations - both suffer at once from the perverse incentive capture of their leaders, misalignment with the goals of their constituents, and the unwieldiness of large bureaucracies that do not keep pace with our times. We’ve yet to resolve basic but all-consuming coordination traps like arms races, prisoner’s dilemmas, and the tragedy of the commons. And as religion and other forms of large-scale group identification steadily lose societal influence even as our intimacy with the world’s horrors increases, we encounter a crisis of meaning, faith, and hope across large swathes of society! We keep getting ‘smarter’ and more powerful without letting wisdom, kindness, or morality catch up and take the wheel. We’re much better at figuring out whether we could do things than whether we should, and the gap between the two feels like it’s ever-widening.
I haven’t found one good term for this societal misalignment/perversion, but a few thinkers have used the term “Moloch” - a Carthaginian/Canaanite entity associated in the Bible with child sacrifice, adapted to represent society’s ills in Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and popularized in internet circles by (to my knowledge) Slate Star Codex’s Scott Alexander.
It’s a lot to make sense of and navigate without getting overwhelmed - even this pithy summary is enough to justify either putting one’s head in the sand or being depressed and anxious much of the time. And yet of all things, surrender is the one most certain not to lead us to a better, more tenable place. In the face of all of this, we have to figure out what to do, how to do it, and how to stay sane and moving throughout it all - and maybe even how to love and be joyous as we do so!
My Approach
I’ve struggled with this over the last few years, trying to figure out what is most worth working on to best contribute to a world that heads towards human flourishing. I sometimes long for my late high school/early undergrad days, when I believed that the systems we had in place - capitalism, liberal democracy, international law, free exchange of information via the internet - were, with some glitches, creating such a world. It’d be wonderful to again believe that the parts add up to a satisfactory whole, to think that all any of us have to do is be kind and work hard at whatever we find interesting within this system. Unfortunately, this is no longer my perspective, yet on most days I’ll take terrible awareness over blissful ignorance, and struggle over apathy.
My basic approach to getting at least a surface understanding of what’s wrong and what needs doing has been to read a lot - I wrote about this a few years ago. I pick a topic, gather 4-6 books on it, read and summarize them, turn the book summaries into a combined ‘topic summary’, network these topics into something of an internal wiki, and try to find some interconnected ground truths by doing so - see if I can find the head of the snake, the root cause issues that would give the most leverage to work on. Past that, it’s been working on parts of problems I find important to gain hands-on experience and understanding, and talking to smarter, more experienced people working in these and related fields! The yeoman’s approach to a more fulsome understanding, if you will.
There are, of course, many brilliant people working hard on every facet of the myriad problems constituting the polycrisis, and some small number poking at/articulating the broader conundrum. But something about the latter’s approach - perhaps their dispassionate/hyper-rational demeanour, perhaps the academic language, perhaps the treatment of it as a game and not as a real, rapidly developing danger - threw me off and felt like it missed the mark.
I felt quit lonely in this pursuit, until I stumbled upon Daniel’s work!
Daniel
Daniel Schmachtenberger is a social philosopher focused on sensemaking and civilization design.
He talks, and sometimes writes, about the underlying dynamics of societal evolution, decision making, existential risks, and the paths forward. Having had the privilege of being around some stupendously smart people so far in my life, he’s probably the smartest/most articulate person I’ve encountered, but that’s not what stands out most.
Among what does:
He thinks well, but also feels deeply - he’s open about his emotions, and is able to express them while maintaining stunning clarity. He’s on the extreme right tail of intelligence while still being very, very human!
His intelligence is paired with a kindness, wisdom, and humility that I very much aspire to - I don’t think it’s in the cards for me, or most of us, to have this powerful a mind, but those other qualities are within reach.
He has little perceptible ego or Messiah complex - he’s just lucid about the problems and really wants to help. He’s said, repeatedly and believably, that he doesn’t like public presentation and would love nothing more than to not do this work, but sees it as his duty to help however he can.
He’s not selling any discernable product or media or anything to that effect! I don’t know how he makes a living, but it doesn’t seem to be by selling stuff.
He’s a rare combination of realistic and hopeful - listening to him is a punch in the gut and makes it hard to think about other stuff, but he’s clearly only talking about the dark and real stuff in its full complexity because he believes we can do better.
He’s deeply committed to good communication! He wrote a post in 2020 about principles for high quality dialogue, and seems to stick to them extraordinarily well.
I admire many people but try to avoid idolatry, and prefer that ideas contend on the basis of logic and intuition over reputation and faith. I also recognize that there are so, so many people putting forward opinions across blogs, social media, scientific journals, think tanks, books, you name it. But I haven’t found anyone to be nearly as consistent a source of signal within the noise on the big ideas that matter as Daniel.
The issue with accessing him and his ideas is the same as with the world at large -there isn’t really one place to start! He doesn’t have a book or video or article series or podcast outlining the core of his ideas. He mostly has conversations on other platforms and meets them where they are, networking their interests into the broader context. He’s as much grokked as learned explicitly, akin to spending years with a person or walking through a gallery than reviewing math equations.
Before I leave you with some entry points into his work, I’ll reiterate what I opened with - his stuff is heavy. With that said, for me it’s felt like medicine, strengthening my intellectual and moral immune system. The work of engaging with him has been steadily motivating both in working towards a tenable world and holding myself to a higher standard within it! I recommend him enough to have written this article - give him a shot.
Starting Points:
This talk is as concise and up to date an intro to his ideas as I’m aware of! It’s ~50 minutes long, by the end you’ll have a sense of what he’s about on the polycrisis side of things.
This page of conversations/podcast appearances is a good place to go next! If you see a host/podcast you’ve liked before, pick that one. If not, whichever title most appeals to you should be good. There are hundreds of hours of conversation here, but I’m sure much of it is retread, so don’t feel overwhelmed!
These articles from the Consillience Project (a sensemaking collective he helped found) address some of the core issues he talks about in a more direct, less conversational style. They’re all good - pick one that aligns with an interest of yours!
Finally, here’s a cool resource that lays out topics he often covers, AI-generated summaries and contexts of said terms, and the conversations they come up in. Aside from being an interesting interface, also a solid way to explore and then dive into the ocean in favourable/familiar waters!
I hope you two play nice and have a good time getting to know each other 😊 Let me know how it goes!
Thank you for writing this. I will point people here when I recommend him. He is my first and only idol. I have been trying to distill what makes him who he is and discern how much of it is replicable to write a book and hopefully replicate myself.