YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Schmachtenberger

lines on the record: 278
first: 2021-06-14
most recent: 2021-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I want to say in terms of what you're mentioning about. You work in machine learning and the optimism that wants to look at the issues but wants to look at how this increased technological power could be applied to solving them and that even thinking about the broadcast of like can I help people understand issues better and help organize them like fundamentally you're oriented like Wikipedia what I see to really try to tend to the information commons without another agentic interest distorting it For you to be able to get guys Lee Smolin and Roger Penrose, and like the greatest thinkers that are alive and have them on the show. And most people would never be exposed to them and talk about it in a way that people can understand. I think it's an incredible service. I think you're doing great work. So I was really happy to hear from you.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I went to go get a smoothie before coming here, I got you a keto smoothie that you didn't want because you're not just keto but fasting. But I saw the thing with you and your dad where you did shots together. This place happened to have shot of ginger turmeric cayenne. Juice of some kind, and so”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tree still looked like if I had to describe it, says green, it has leaves, looks like this, but it was way fucking more beautiful, like capturing than it normally was. And I'm like, why is it so beautiful if I would describe it the same way? And I realized I had no thoughts taking me anywhere else. Like what it seemed like the mushrooms were doing was just actually shutting the narrative off that would have me be distracted so I could really see the tree. I'm like, fuck, when I get off these mushrooms, I'm going to practice seeing the tree because it's always that beautiful, and I just miss it. And so I practice being with it and quieting the rest of the mind and then being like, wow. And if it's not mushrooms, like people have peak experiences where they'll see life and how incredible it is. It's always there.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person who I really love when we're talking, I look at their face. I, in the context of a conversation, feel overwhelmed by how lucky I am to get to know them. And there's never been someone like them in all of history. And there never will be again, and they might be gone tomorrow. I might be gone tomorrow. And like, I get this moment with them. And when you take in the uniqueness of that fully and the beauty of it, it's overwhelmingly beautiful. And I remember the first time I did a big dose of mushrooms. And I was looking at a tree for a long time, and I was just crying with overwhelm at how beautiful the tree was. And it was a tree outside the front of my house that I'd walk by a million times and never looked at like this. And it wasn't a dose of mushrooms where I was hallucinating like where the tree was purple.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I feel Feel unreasonably fortunate. It is a such a humongous list because Feel fortunate to have had exposure to practices and philosophies and a way of saying things that makes me see things that way. So I can take responsibility for seeing things in that way and not taking for granted really wonderful things, but I can't take credit for being exposed to the philosophies that even gave me that possibility. Know it's not just with my wife, it's with.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them were kind of spiritual ideas as well. I went through a phase in my early 20s where I kind of had the attitude that Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens has that can kind of be... Like excessively certain and sanctimonious applying their reductionist philosophy of science to everything and kind of brutally dismissive. I'm embarrassed by that phase. Not to say anything about those men and their path, but for myself. And so during that time, I was more dismissive of my dad's epistemology than I would have liked to have been. I got to correct that later and apologize for it. But that's the first thought that came to mind.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe next time on your show I'll wear a suit and tie. My dad would be happy about that. I can answer the question later in life, not early. I had just a huge amount of respect and reverence for my dad when I was young, so I was asking myself that question a lot. So there weren't a lot of things I knew that I wasn't seeking to apply. Was a phase when I went through my kind of individuation differentiation where I had to make him excessively wrong about too many things. I don't think I had to, but I did. He had a lot of kind of non standard model beliefs about things, whether Kind of ancient civilizations or ideas on evolutionary theory or alternate models of physics. Weren't irrational, but they didn't all have the standard. Epistemic proof that I would need. And I went through”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the height of the holes was similar, that we twisted the wires in a particular way. And it's like no one's ever going to see it. And he's like, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And excellence is its own reward and those types of ideas. And if there was a really shitty job to do, he'd say, see the job do the job, stay out of the misery. Just don't indulge any negativity. Do the things that need done. And so there's like an empowerment and a nobility together. And yeah, extraordinarily fortunate.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The intersection of self empowerment, ideas, and practices that self empower towards collective good, towards some virtuous purpose beyond the self. And he both said that a million different ways, taught it in a million different ways. When we were doing construction and he was teaching me how to build a house, we were The wires to the walls before the drywall went on, he made sure that the way that we put the wires through is beautiful.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, people can read the blog post and see a lot of individual things that I learned that I really appreciated. If I was to kind of summarize at a high level A really incredible dad. Very, very unusually positive set of experiences. He was committed. We were homeschooled, and he was committed to work from home to be available and like prioritize fathering in a really deep way. And as a super gifted, super loving, very unique man, he also had his unique issues that were part of what crafted the unique brilliance and those things often go together. And I say that because I think I had some unusual gifts and also some unusual difficulties. And I think it's useful for everybody to know their path probably has both of those. If I was to say kind of at the essence of one of the things my dad taught me across a lot of lessons was like,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And creating an extras landscape, but could also be redirected towards more prototic purposes, and then saying, how do we rebuild new social institutions? What are adequate social institutions where we can do participatory governance at scale and time? And how can the people actually participate to build those things? The solution that I see working requires a process like that.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At being able to internalize externality, solve the problems on the right timescale and the right geographic scale. And those new processes to not be imposed have to emerge from people wanting them. And being able to participate in their development, which is what I would call kind of a new cultural enlightenment, a renaissance that has to happen, where people start understanding the new power that exponential tech offers, the way that it is actually damaging current governance structures that we care about.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not for people under 18. They'd already killed so many people, and we let the market do the thing. But as Elon has made the point, that won't work for AI. By the time we recognize afterwards that we have an autopoetic AI that's a problem, you won't be able to reverse it, that there's a number of things that when you're dealing with tech that is either self-replicating and disintermediates humans to keep going doesn't need humans to keep going, or you have tech that just has exponentially fast effects, your regulation has to come early. It can't come after the effects have happened, the negative effects have happened because the negative effects could be too big too quickly. So we basically need new problem-solving processes that do”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The nation states to do different things and/or build new ones themselves. Yeah, fundamentally that's the thing that has to happen. The exponential tech gives us a novel problem landscape that the world never had. The nuke gave us a novel problem landscape. And so that required this whole Bretton Woods world. The exponential tech gives us novel problem landscape. Our existing problem solving processes aren't doing a good job. We have had more countries get nukes. We haven't a nuclear deproliferation. We haven't achieved any of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We haven't kept any of the new categories of tech from making arms races. So our global coordination is not adequate to the problem landscape. So we need fundamentally better problem solving processes. A market or a state is a problem solving process. We need better ones that can do the speed and scale of the current issues. Right now speed is one of the other big things is that by the time we regulated DDT out of existence or cigarettes”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital technologies and exponential tech in general to try to increase the capacity to do that, where the technology called a town hall, the social tech that we'd all get together and talk obviously is very scale limited. And it's also oriented to geography rather than networks of aligned interest. Can we build new better versions of those types of things? And going back to the idea that a democracy or participatory governance depends upon comprehensive education in the science of government, which includes being able to understand things like asymmetric information warfare on the side of governments and how the people can organize adequately, can you utilize some of the technologies now to be able to support increased comprehensive education of the people and maybe comprehensive information, so both fixing the decay in both education in the fourth estate that have happened so that people can start self-organizing to then influence the corporations”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's come back to the fundamental thing. The fundamental thing is we want a kind of order at various scales from the conflicting parts of ourself actually having more harmony than they might have to family, extended family, local, all the way up to global. We want emergent order where our choices Have more alignment, right? We want that to be emergent rather than imposed, or rather than we want fundamentally different things or make totally different sense of the world where warfare of some kind becomes the only solution. Emergent order requires us in our choice making requires us being able to have related sense making and related meaning making processes. Can we apply”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See what you're talking about is the application of tech here broadcast tech where you can speak to a lot of people. And that's not going to be strong enough because the different people need spoken to differently, which means it has to be different voices that get amplified to those audiences more like Facebook's tech. But nonetheless, we'll start with broadcast tech.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the rational actor that will pursue all the goods and services and choose the best one at the best price, the kind of rand von Mises Hayek that you can rescue that from Dan Arielli and behavioral econ that says that's actually not how people make choices. They make it based on status hacking. Largely, whether it's good for them or not in the long term. And the large asymmetric corporation can run propaganda and narrative warfare that hits people's status buttons and their limbic hijacks and there lots of other things in ways that they can't even perceive that are happening. They're not paying attention to that. This site is employing psychologists and split testing and whatever else. So you're saying, I think we can recover homoeconomicists.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so maybe The corporation Has coordination on its goals that all of its customers or users together don't have. So there's some asymmetry where it's. Asymmetry of its goals, but maybe I could actually help all of the customers to coordinate almost like a labor union or whatever by informing and educating them adequately about the effects, the externalities on them. This is not toxic waste going into the ocean of the atmosphere. It's their minds, their beings, their families, their relationships, such that they will in group change their behavior. I think the idea One way of saying what you're saying, I think, is that you think that you can rescue homo economicus.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The harvest and directing of attention is even a more powerful system than capitalism. It is effective in capitalism to generate capital, but I think it also generates influence beyond what capital can do. And so do we want to have some groups utilizing that type of tech to direct other people's attention? If so... Towards what? Towards what metrics of what a good civilization and good human life would be. What's the oversight process? What is the”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where people still feel free in some meaningful way. They're not feeling like they're going to be punished by the state if they don't do something. It's like punished by the market via homelessness or something. And so If you want to affect people's behavior. And still have them feel free. Capital ends up being a way to do that. But I think affecting their attention is even deeper. Because if I can affect their attention, Can both affect what they want and what they believe and what they feel. And we statistically know this very clearly. Facebook has done studies that based on changing the feed, it can change beliefs, emotional dispositions, etc. And so I think there's a way that the”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capitalism More capital ended up meaning more control. Could put more people under my employment, I could buy larger pieces of land, novel access to resource, mines, and put more technology under my employment. So it meant increased agency and also increased control. I think attentionalism is even more powerful So rather than enslave people where the people kind of always want to get away and put in the least work they can, there's a way in which economic servitude was just more profitable than slavery. Have the people work even harder voluntarily because they want to get ahead and nobody has to be there to whip them or control them or whatever this is a cynical take, but a meaningful take. So So capital ends up being a way to influence human behavior, right? And yet,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you think about business, I'm going to produce a good or a service that people want and bring it to the market so that people get access to that good or service. That's the world of business. But that's not capitalism. Capitalism is the management and allocation of capital, which financial services was a tiny percentage of the total market has become a huge percentage of the total market. It's a different culture. So if I was in business and I was producing a good or service and I was saving up enough money that I started to be able to invest that money and gain interest or do things like that, I start realizing I'm making more money on my money than I'm making on producing the goods and services. So I stop even paying attention to goods and services and start paying attention to making money on money and how do I utilize capital to create more capital. And capital gives me more optionality because I can buy anything with it than a particular good or service that only some people want.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like I said, every social tech worked for a while, like tribalism worked well for two or three hundred thousand years. I think social tech has to keep evolving. The social technologies with which we organize and coordinate our behavior have to keep evolving as our physical tech does. So I think the thing that we call markets. Course, we can try to say, oh, even biology runs on markets, but the thing that we call markets, the underlying theory, homoeconomicists demand driving supply, that thing broke. It broke with scale in particular, and a few other things. So it needs updated in a really fundamental way. I think there's something even deeper than making money happening. In some ways, will obsolete money making. I think capitalism is not about business.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I'm interested in the application of exponential tech to making better social tech that makes emergent order possible, and where then that emergent order can bind and direct the exponential tech in fundamentally healthy not x risk oriented directions. I think the relationship of social tech and physical tech can make it. I think we can actually use the physical tech to make better social tech, but it's not given that we do. If we don't make better social tech, then I think the physical tech empowers really shitty social tech that it's not a world that we want.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are also debasing the integrity of the nation states, the open societies. So the democracies are getting weaker as a result of exponential tech and the kind of new tech companies that are kind of a new feudalism, tech feudalism, because it's not a democracy inside of a tech company or the supply and demand relationship when you have manufactured demand and kind of monopoly type functions. And so we have basically a new feudalism controlling exponential tech and authoritarian nation states controlling it, and those attractors are both shitty.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we really also have to update our theory of markets because behavioral econ showed that homoeconomicists, the rational actor, is not really a thing, but particularly at greater and greater scale can really be a thing. Voluntaryism isn't a thing where if my company doesn't want to advertise on Facebook, I just will lose to the companies that do because it's where all the fucking attention is. And so then I can say it's voluntary, but it's not really if there's a functional monopoly. Same if I'm going to sell on Amazon or things like that. So what I would say is these corporations are becoming more powerful than nation states in some ways. And”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so as soon as manufactured demand started through, this is the cool thing and you have to have it for status or whatever it is, the intelligence of the market was breaking. Now it's no longer collective intelligence system that is upregulating real desire for things that are really meaningful. You're able to hijack the lower angels of our nature rather than the higher ones, the addictive patterns drive those and have people watch it that doesn't actually make them happy or make the world better.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the asymmetry now in terms of the total technology it employs total amount of money, amount of information processing is so many orders of magnitude. And rather than there be demand for an authentic thing that creates a basis for supply, as supply started to get way more coordinated and powerful and the demand wasn't coordinated because you don't have a labor union of all the customers working together, but you do have a coordination on the supply side. Supply started to recognize that it could manufacture demand. It could make people want shit that they didn't want before that maybe wouldn't increase their happiness in a meaningful way might increase addiction. Addiction is a very good way to manufacture demand.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what we see is that the new exponential technology is being directed by authoritarian nation states to make better authoritarian nation states and by corporations to make more powerful corporations. The powerful corporations, when we think about the Scottish Enlightenment, when the idea of The biggest corporation Was tiny Compared to what the biggest corporation today is. So the asymmetry of it relative to people was tiny”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tech using the exponential tech. Otherwise, within a nation state like the US but democratic open societies, the countries, the states are not directing the technology in a way that makes a better open society, meaning better emergent order. They're saying, well, the corporations are doing that, and the state is doing the relatively little thing it would do aligned with the previous corporate law that no longer is relevant because there wasn't fiduciary responsibility for things like that. There wasn't antitrust because this creates functional monopolies because of network dynamics, right, where YouTube has more users than Bimeo and every other video player together. Amazon has a bigger percentage of market share than all of the other markets together. You get one big dog per vertical because of network effect, which is a kind of organic monopoly that the previous antitrust law didn't even have a place. That wasn't a thing that emerged in the space of government contracts.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be amazing to start to explore. And this is now the thesis that we started to discuss before is every time there is a major step function in the physical tech, it obsoletes the previous social tech and the new social tech has to emerge. What I would say is that when we look at the nation-state level of the world today, more top-down authoritarian nation states are as the exponential tech started to emerge, the digital technology started to emerge, they were in a position for better long-term planning and better coordination. And so the authoritarian state started applying the exponential tech intentionally to make more effective authoritarian states. And that's everything from like an Internet of Things surveillance system going into machine learning systems to the Sesame credit system to all those types of things. And so they're upgrading their social...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This evolved for Fulfilling particular agentic purpose. Most people, when they're on Facebook, think it's just a tool that they're using, they don't realize it's an agent. It is a corporation with a profit motive. And as I'm interacting with it, it has a goal for me different than my goal for myself. And I might want to be on for a short period of time. Its goal is maximize time on site. And so there is a rivalry that is take, but where there should be a fiduciary contract. I think that's actually a huge deal. And I think if we said, could we apply Facebook-like technology? Develop people's citizenry capacity, right? To develop their personal health and well-being and habits as well as their cognitive understanding, the complexity with which they can process, the health of their relationships,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even a therapist or a doctor or a lawyer or a priest might have in a different setting, they basically are accessing privileged information, there should be a fiduciary responsibility. And in normal fiduciary law, if there's this principal agent thing, if you are a principal and I'm an agent on your behalf, I don't have a game theoretic relationship with you, right? If you're sharing something with me and I'm the priest or I'm the therapist, I'm never going to use that information to try to sell you a used car or whatever the thing is. But Facebook is gathering massive amounts of privileged information and then using it to modify people's behavior for a behavior that they didn't sign up for wanting the behavior, but what the corporation did. So I think this is an example of the physical tech evolving in the context of the previous social tech where it's being shaped in particular ways. And here, unlike Wikipedia that evolved for the information commons,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea that if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product. If they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholder maximize profit, their customer is the advertiser, the user who it's being built for is to do behavioral mod for them for advertisers. That's a whole different thing than that same type of tech could have been if applied with a different business model or different purpose. I think because Facebook and Google and other information and communication platforms end up harvesting data about user behavior that allows them to model who the people are in a way that gives them more sometimes specific information and behavioral information than”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the ad model that Silicon Valley took, I think Jaron Lanier, I don't know if you've had him on the show, but he has interesting assessment of the nature of the ad model Silicon Valley wanting to support capitalism and entrepreneurs to make things, but also the belief that information should be free and also the network dynamics where the more people you got on, you got increased value per user per capita as more people got on, so you didn't want to do anything to slow the rate of adoption. Some places actually, you know, PayPal paying people money to join the network because the value of the network would be a Metcalf-like dynamic proportional to the square of the total number of users. So the ad model made sense of how do we make it free but also be a business, get everybody on, but not really thinking about what it would mean to, and this is now the whole.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where I have to sacrifice one for the other, and I can't find synergistic satisfiers, which one, and if I have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholder profit maximization and what does that end up creating?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a celebrity topic or corporate interest topic, you can pay Wikipedia editors to edit more frequently and various things like that. But you can also see where there's a lot of information that was kind of decentrally created, that is good information, that is more easily accessible to people than everybody buying their own encyclopedia, Britannica, or walking down to the library, and that can be updated in real-time faster. I think you're very right that the business model is a big difference because Wikipedia is not a for-profit corporation. It is a, it's tending to the information commons, and it doesn't have an agenda other than tending to the information commons. And I think the two masters issue is a tricky one. What I'm trying to optimize for very different kinds of things.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are good potentials, even if I don't know what they are, that are worth seeking. There's kind of a, there is some sense of optimism that's required to even try to innovate really hard problems But then I want to take my pessimism and red team my own optimism to see is that solution not going to work? Does it have second order effects and then knock it upset by that because I then come back to how to make it better? So just a relationship between optimism and pessimism and the dialectic of how they can work. So of course we can say that Wikipedia is a pretty awesome example of a thing. We can look at the places where it has limits or has failed where”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depending upon the metrics we're looking at, things are getting worse on exponential curves and better on exponential curves for different metrics at the same time, which I hold is the destabilization of previous system, and either an emergence to a better system or collapse to a lower order are both possible. And so I want my optimism not to be about my assessment. I want my assessment to be just as fucking clear as it can be. I want my optimism to be what inspires the solution process on that clear assessment. I never want to apply optimism in the sense making, right? I want to just try to be clear. If anything, I want to make sure that the challenges are really well understood. But that's in service of an optimism that”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it would be a useful exercise for any. Listener of the show to Really try to run the dialectical synthesis process with regard to a topic like this and take the techno concern perspective with regard to information tech that folks like Tristan Harris take and say what are all of the things that are getting worse and what and are any of them following an exponential curve and how much worse how quickly could that be And then do that fully without mitigating it. Then take the techno optimist perspective and see what things are getting better in a way that Kurzwell or Diamondus or someone might do and try to take that perspective fully and say are some of those things exponential? What could that portend? And then try to hold all that at the same time. And I think there are ways in which”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, Linux is awesome, right? And Wikipedia and places where you have, and they have problems, but places where you have open source sharing of information, betting of information towards collective building. Is that building something like how much has that affected our court systems or our policing systems or our military systems or our?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we'll do that as the last step, but what we want to do first is to say how does the thing that you care about that seems damaged by this proposition, how could that turn into a solution to make this proposition better where this proposition still tends to the thing it's trying to tend to and tends to that better? Can we work on this together? In the in a town hall, we could have that as the scale increased we lost the ability to do that. Now, as you mentioned, the internet could change that. The fact that we had representatives that had to ride a horse from one town hall to the other one to see what the colony would do, that we stopped having this kind of developmental propositional development process when the town hall ended. The fact that we have not used the internet to recreate this is Somewhere between insane and”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, if the number one goal is anything other than the comprehensive education of all the citizens in the science of government, it won't stay democracy long. You can see, so both education and the fourth estate, the fourth estate being the, so education, can I make sense of the world? Am I trained to make sense of the world? The fourth estate is what's actually going on currently, the news. Do I have good unbiased information about it? Those are both considered prerequisite institutions for democracy to even be a possibility. And then at the scale it was initially suggested here, the town hall was the key phenomena where there wasn't a special interest group crafted a proposition and the first thing I ever saw was the proposition didn't know anything about it and I got a vote yes or no. It was in the town hall we all got to talk about it and the proposition could get crafted in real time through the conversation which is why there was that founding father statement that voting is the death of democracy. Voting fundamentally polarizing the population in some kind of sublimated war.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Game theory, coordination theory, history. It wouldn't call game theory yet. History, sociology, economics, right? All the things that lead to how we understand human coordination. I think it's so profound that he didn't say the number one aim of the federal government is rule of law. And he didn't say it's protecting the border from enemies because if the number one aim was to protect the border from enemies, it could do that as military dictatorship, quite effectively. And if the goal was rule of law, it could do it as a dictatorship, as a police state.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why I believe Jefferson said if you could give me a perfect newspaper and a broken government or in paraphrasing or a broken government perfect newspaper, I wouldn't hesitate to take the perfect newspaper. Because if the people understand what's going on, they can build a new government. And Washington, I'm paraphrasing again, first president said the number one aim of the federal government should be the comprehensive education of every citizen in the science of government. Science of government was the term of art. Think about what that means, right? Science of government would be”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's actually necessary. Okay, so let's go to the first part and then we'll come to the second part So democracy emerged as an Enlightenment era idea that we could all do a dialectic and come to understand what other people valued, and so that we could actually come up with a cooperative solution rather than just fuck you, we're going to get our thing in war, right? And that we could sense make together. We could all apply the philosophy of science and you weren't going to stick to your guns on what the speed of sound is if we measured it and we found out what it was and there's a unifying element of the objectivity in that way.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, it's the proposition crafting and refinement process has to be key to a democracy or to a participatory governance. And it's not currently”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't even try in the process of crafting a proposition currently to see, and this is the reason that the proposition we vote on, it gets half the votes almost all the time. It almost never gets 90% of the votes, is because it benefits some things and harms other things. And we can say all the theory of trade-offs, but we didn't even try to say, could we see what everybody cares about and see if there was a better solution?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we have to be able to have shared sense making of can we come to understand just what is happening together? And then can we do shared values generation? Okay, maybe I'm emphasizing a particular value more than you, but I can see how I can take your perspective and I can see how the thing that you value is worth valuing, and I can see how it's affected by this thing. So can we take all the values and try to come up with a proposition that benefits all of them better than the proposition I created just to benefit these ones, it harms the ones that you care about, which is why you're opposing my proposition.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source