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

“So, sadism is really jealousy is one step on the path to sadism from the healthy compassion conversion access. So I would like to see a society that is inversely, that is conditioning sadism and jealousy inversely, right? The lower that amount and the more the compassion compersion. And if I had to summarize that very simply, I would say it would optimize for compersion.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idea that I'm actually upset at the happiness or fulfillment or success of another is like a profoundly fucked up thing. No, we shouldn't shame it and represses who it gets worse. We should study it. Where does it come from? And it comes from our own insecurities and stuff. But then the next part that everybody knows is really fucked up is just on the same axis. It's the same inverted, which is, so the jealousy or the envy is the I feel badly when you're doing well. The sadism side is I actually feel good when you lose or when you're in pain I feel some happiness that's associated. And you can see when someone feels jealous, sometimes they feel jealous with a partner and then they feel they want that partner to get it. Revenge comes up or something.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, the metric I'm going to say Is the compassion compersion axis, is the thing I would optimize for. Now, there is a state where my emotional states and your emotional states are just totally decoupled. And that is like sociopathy. I don't want to hurt you, but I don't care if I do or for you to do well or whatever. But there's a worse state, and it's extremely common, which is where they're inversely coupled. Where my positive emotions correspond to your negative ones and vice versa. And that is the I would call it the jealousy sadism axis. The jealousy axis is when you're doing really well, I feel something bad. I feel taken away from, less than, upset, envious, whatever. That's so common. But I think of it as kind of a low grade psychopathology that we've just normalized.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell you one more that I really like. There's a number, but the next one that comes to mind is. I have to make a very quick model Healthy human bonding. Say we were in a tribal type setting. My positive emotional states and your positive emotional states would most of the time be correlated, your negative emotional states in mine. And so you start laughing, I start laughing, you start crying, my eyes might tear up. We would call that the compassion compersion axis. I would. This is a model I find useful. So compassion is when you're feeling something negative, I feel some pain. I feel some empathy, something in relationship. Compersion is when you do well, I'm stoked for you, right? Like I actually feel happiness at your happiness.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would we want to create that would develop the healthiest, happiest, most moral noble, meaningful people? What are even those sets of things that matter? So you end up getting deep existential consideration at the heart of civilization design when you start to realize how powerful we're becoming and how much what we're building it in service towards matters”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conditioning is a bad word because we like our idea of sovereignty, but when we recognize the language that we speak and the words that we think in and the patterns of thought built into that language and the aesthetics that we like and so much is conditioned in us just based on where we're born, you can't not condition people. So all you can do is take more responsibility for the conditioning factors are and then you have to think about this question of what is a meaningful human life because we're unlike the other animals born into environment that they're genetically adapted for, we're building new environments that we were not adapted for and then we're becoming affected by those. So then we have to say, well, what kinds of environments, digital environments, physical environments, social environments?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the different levels of intensity, different periodices. Now, I do not think this should be imposed by states. I think it should emerge from cultures. And I think the cultures are developing people that understand the value of it so that people, so there is both a cultural cohesion to it, but there's also a voluntarism because the people value the thing that is being developed, they understand it”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It not only has us overcome something by ourselves, but overcome it together with each other where nobody bails when it gets hard because the other people are there. So it's both a resilience of the individuals and a resilience of the bonding. So, I think we'll keep getting more and more comfortable stuff, but we have to also develop resilience in the presence of that for the anti-addiction direction and the fullness of character and the trustworthiness to others.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's what the Sweat Lodge and the Vision Quest and the Solo Journey and the Ayahuasca journey and the sundance were. I think it's even a big part of what Yoga Asana was, is to make beings that are resilient and strong, they have to overcome some things. To make beings that can control their own mind and fear, they have to face some fears. But we don't want to put everybody in war or real trauma. And yet we can see that The most fucked up people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma, but some of the most incredible people we know had childhoods of a lot of trauma, whether or not they happened to make it through and overcome that or not. So how do we get the benefits of the stealing of character and the resilience and the whatever that happened from the difficulty without traumatizing people, a certain kind of ritualized discomfort?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is then also where comfort and addiction start to get very close. And the ability to go in the other direction from addiction is the ability to be exposed to hypernormal stimuli and not Go down the path of desensitizing to other stimuli and needing that hypernormal stimuli, which does involve a kind of hormesis. So I do think the civilization of the future has to create something like ritualized discomfort.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Compulsive behavior that is destructive towards things that we value. I think that's a very interesting one to think about.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One index that I find very interesting is the inverse correlation of addiction within the society. The more a society produces addiction within the people in it, the less healthy I think the society is as a pretty fundamental metric. And so the more the individuals feel that there are less compulsive things compelling them to behave in ways that are destructive to their own values. And insofar as a civilization is conditioning and influencing the individuals within it, The inverse of addiction”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll give you some kind of simple answers to that that are meaningful to me. But let me do the societal indices first because they're fun. We should take a note of this meaningful thing because it's important to come back to”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why I know you're not So, one metric There are problems with this, but one metric that I like to just as a thought experiment to consider is because you're actually asking, I mean, I know you ask your guests about the meaning of life, because ultimately when you're saying what is a desirable civilization, you can't answer that without answering what is a meaningful human life and to say what is a good civilization, because it's going to be in relationship to that, right? Then you have whatever your answer is. How do you know? What is the epistemic basis for postulating that?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is why the first verse of the Tao Te Ching is the Tao that is namable, not the eternal Tao. The naming then can become the source of the ten thousand things that if you get carried away with it can actually obscure you from paying attention to reality beyond the models.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I want to optimize that across the entire population, starting with infants. The same way that love isn't a metric, but you could make metrics look at certain parts of it. The thing I'm about to say isn't a metric, but it's a consideration. Because I thought about this a lot. I don't think there is a metric, a right one. I think that every metric by itself, without this thing we talked about, is a continuous improvement becomes a paperclip maximizer. I think that's why what the idea of false idol means in terms of the model of reality not being reality, then my sacred relationship is to reality itself, which also binds me to the unknown forever, to the known, but also to the unknown. And there's a sense of sacredness connected to the unknown that creates an epistemic humility that is always seeking not just to optimize the thing I know, but to learn new stuff. And to be open to perceive reality directly. So my model never becomes sacred. My model's useful.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The girdles in completeness theorem, right? Which is if the set of things is consistent, it won't be complete. So we're going to keep adding to it, which is why we were saying earlier, I don't think it's not beautiful And especially if you were just saying one of the metrics you want to optimize for at the individual level is becoming, right? That we're becoming more. Well, that then becomes true for the civilization and our metric sets as well. And our definition of how to think about a meaningful life in a meaningful civilization. I can tell you what some of my favorite metrics are. Well, love is obviously not a metric.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means that there is something in you that is recognizing a new metric that's important that isn't part of that metric set. So there's a certain kind of. Connection, discernment. Awareness, and this is”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to think through the first and second and third order effects of what happens it's positive, and then also say what negative things can happen from optimizing that. What actually matters that is not included in that or in that way of defining it? Because love versus number of positive thoughts per day, I could just make a long list of names and just say positive thing about each one. It's all very superficial, not include animals or the rest of life, have a very shallow total amount of it, but I'm optimizing the number. And if I get some credit for the number, and this is when I said the model of reality isn't reality. When you make a set of metrics, they were going to optimize for this. Whatever reality is that is not included in those metrics can be the areas where harm occurs, which is why I would say that wisdom is something like”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would the metrics for a good civilization be if I had to pick a set of metrics? What would the best ones be if I was going to optimize for those? And then really try to run the thought experiment more deeply and say, okay, so what happens if we optimize for that?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm giving an example now of the primary metric we use and why it's not an adequate metric because we're exploring other ones. So the idea of saying”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the process of saying, okay, Not take GDP or GDP per capita as the metric one optimized for because GDP goes up during war and it goes up with more healthcare spending from sicker people and various things that we wouldn't say correlate to quality of life. Addiction drives GDP awesomely.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So When we start saying, can we? Make tech where we're measuring for the things that it produces beyond just the measure of GDP or whatever particular measures look like the revenue generation or profit generation of my business. Are all the meaningful things measurable? What are the right measures? And what are the externalities of optimizing for that measurement set? What meaningful things aren't included in that measurement set that might have their own externalities? These are some of the questions we actually have to take seriously.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comfort suicide and mental illness of the And we also see that some of the happiest cultures are actually some of the ones that are in materially lame environments. And so there's a very interesting question here. And if I understand correctly, you do cold showers. And Joe Rogan was talking about how he needs to do some fairly intensive kind of struggle that is a non-comfort to actually induce being better as a person. This concept of hormesis that it's actually stressing an adaptive system that increases its adaptive capacity and that there's something that the happiness of a system has something to do with its adaptive capacity. Its overall resilience, health, well-being, which requires a decent bit of discomfort. And yet in the presence of the comfort solution, it's very hard to not choose it. And then as you're choosing it regularly to actually down-regulate your overall adaptive capacity.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the Industrial Revolution started to replace happiness with comfort quite heavily as the thing it was optimizing for. And we can see that when increased comfort is given, maybe because of the evolutionary disposition that expending extra calories for the majority of our history we didn't have extra calories was not a safe thing to do. Who knows why? When extra comfort is given, it's very easy to take that path, even if it's not the path that supports overall well-being long term. So we can see that when you look at the techno-optimist idea that we have better lives than Egyptian pharaohs and kings and whatever, what they're largely looking at is how comfortable our beds are and how comfortable the transportation systems are and things like that, in which case there's massive improvement. But we also see that in some of the nations where people have access to the most”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can measure with technology that the shocks in a car are making the car bounce less, that the bed is softer and material science and those types of things. And happiness is actually hard for philosophers to define because some people find that there are certain kinds of overcoming suffering that are necessary for happiness. There's happiness that feels more like contentment and happiness. It feels more like passion is passion the source of all suffering or the source of all creativity. There's deep stuff and it's mostly first person, not measurable third person stuff, even if maybe it corresponds to third-person stuff to some degree, but we also see examples of some of our favorite examples is people who are in the worst environments who end up finding happiness, right? Where the third person stuff looks to be less conducive and there's some Victor Frankl Nelson Mandela or whatever. But it's pretty easy to measure comfort. It's pretty universal. And I think we can see.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure to include one piece every 15 minutes as we go. It's easier to measure. Problems with this argument, but there's also utility to it. So let's take it for the utility it has first. Harder to measure happiness than it is to measure comfort”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think roughly, yes, I think bad and good are kind of silly concepts here. Good for some things, bad for other things, for some contexts and others. Even that Give you an example that relates back to the Facebook measuring thing you were mentioning a moment ago. First, I think what you're saying is actually aligned with the right direction, and what I want to get to in a moment. But the devil is in the details here.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so there's a lot of things that we Need to construct to come back to this like what is the basis of rivalry? How do you bind it? How does it relate to tech? If you have a culture that is doing less rivalry, does it always lose in war to those who do war better? And how do you make something and the enactment of how to get there from here?”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eating the foods that were rare in our evolutionary environment that give us more dopamine hit because they were rare in they're not anymore salt, fat, sugar. Is there something pleasurable about those where humans have an orientation to overeat if they can? Well, the fact that there is that possibility doesn't mean everyone will obligately be obese and die of obesity, right? Like it's possible to have a particular impulse and to be able to understand it, have other ones and be able to balance them. And so to say that power dynamics are obligate in humans and we can't do anything about it is very similar to me to saying everyone is going to be obligately obese.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is an impulse towards power that is innate in people and can be conditioned one way or the other, yes. But you can see that Buddhist society does a very different thing with it at scale, that you don't end up seeing the emergence of the same types of sociopathic behavior and particularly then creating sociopathic institutions. And so it's like”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone that benefits from asymmetries of power Don't necessarily benefit from decreasing those asymmetries of power and kind of increasing the capacity of people more widely. And so when we talk about Power we're talking about asymmetries in agency, influence, and control”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the worst ones become high end lawyers or whatever. And then I look at an inner city school with a totally different set of things, and I see a very, very differently displaced Gaussian distribution, but a very different set of conditioning factors. So then I say the masses, well, if all those kids who were one of the parts of the masses got to go to Exeter and have that family and whatever, would they still be the masses? Could we actually condition? More social virtue, more civic virtue, more orientation towards dialectical synthesis, more empathy, more rationality, widely yes. Would that lead to better capacity for something like participatory governance, democracy or republic or some kind of participatory governance? Yes. Is it necessary for it, actually? Yes. And is it good for class interests? Not really”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the idea of the masses is actually a kind of propaganda. That is useful for the classes that control To popularize the idea that most people are too violent, lazy, undisciplined, and irrational to make good choices, and therefore their choices should be sublimated in some kind of way. I think that if we look back at these conditioning environments, Can say, okay, so the kids, the To a really fancy school and have a good developmental environment like Exeter Academy. There's still a Gaussian distribution of how well they do on any particular metric, but on average they become senators.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think one of the important things that I like to do is look at the examples of the populations, what Buddhism shows regarding compassion or what is Judaism shows around education. The average level of education that everybody gets because of a culture that is really working on conditioning it or various cultures, what are the positive deviance outside of the statistical deviance to see what is actually possible and then say, what are the conditioning factors? And can we condition those across a few of them simultaneously? And could we build a civilization like that becomes a very interesting question? So there's this kind of real politic idea that humans are violent, large groups of humans become violent, they become irrational, specifically those two things, rivalrous and violent and irrational. And so in order to minimize the total amount of violence and have some good decisions, they need rules somehow, and that not getting that is some kind of naive utopianism that doesn't understand human nature yet. This gets back to like mimesis of desire as an inexorable thing.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole spectrum of genetic variance that is happening within a culture of that many people and head traumas and whatever and nobody hurts bugs. And then you look at a group where the kids grow up as child soldiers in Liberia or Darfur, where to make it to adulthood, pretty much everybody's killed people hand to hand, and killed people who were civilian or innocent type people. And you say, okay, so we were very neotanous. We can be conditioned by our environment, and humans can be conditioned where almost all the humans show up in these two different bell curves. It doesn't mean that the Buddhist had no violence. It doesn't mean that these people had no compassion, but they're very different Gaussian distributions.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let's look at Cultural outliers in terms of violence versus compassion. We can see that a lot of cultures have relatively lower in-group violence, bigger outgroup violence, and there's some variance in them and variants at different times based on the scarcity or abundance of resource and other things. But you can look at, say, Jains, whose whole religion is around nonviolence so much so that they don't even hurt plants. They only take fruits that fall off them and stuff. Or to go to a larger population, you take Buddhists, where for the most part, with a few exceptions, for the most part across three millennia and across lots of different countries and geographies and whatever, you have 10 million people plus or minus who don't hurt bugs.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you watch those videos that are criticizing whether it's the woke Antifa side or the QAnon Trump supporter side, does it seem like they have increased empathy for people that are outside of their ideologic”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in terms of a global level, Speed at which we are actually interconnected, the speed at which the harm happening to something in Wuhan affects the rest of the world or a new technology developed somewhere affects the entire world or an environmental issue or whatever is making it to where we either actually all get, not as a spiritual idea, just even as physics, right? We all get the interconnectedness of everything and that we either all consider that and see how to make it through more effectively together, or failures anywhere end up becoming decreased quality of life and failures and increased risk everywhere.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weaponry and not just the kinetic war, the information war and the narrative war and the economic war, right? Like it just increased capacity in all of those fronts. And so what seems like a win to us. The short term might actually really produce losses in the long term. And what's even in our own best interest in the long term is probably more aligned with everyone else because we interfect each other. And I think the thing about globalism, globalization and exponential tech and the rate at which we affect each other and the rate at which we affect the biosphere that we're all affected by is that this kind of proverbial spiritual idea that we're all interconnected and need to think about that in some way that was easy for tribes to get because everyone in the tribe so clearly saw their interconnection and dependence on each other.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if we We can have a rivalrous intent where our in-group, whatever it is, maybe it's our political party wanting to win within the US, maybe it's our nation state wanting to win in a war or an economic war over resource or whatever it is. That if we don't obliterate the other people completely, they don't go away. They're not engendered to like us more. They didn't become less smart, so they have more enmity towards us, and whatever technologies we employed to be successful, they will now reverse engineer, make iterations on, and come back. And so you drive an arms race, which is why you can see that the wars were over history employing more lethal.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we could see some of the second order effects or externalities that we aren't used to seeing, specifically the one of a kid being radicalized somewhere else, which engenders enmity in them towards us, which decreases our own future security. Even if you don't care about the kid, if you care about the kid, it's a whole other thing. Yeah, I mean, I think when we saw this, when Jane Fonda and others went to Vietnam and took photos and videos of what was happening and you got to see the pictures of the kids with napalm on them, like the anti-war effort was bolstered by that in a way it couldn't have been without that. There's a... Until we can see the images, you can't have a mirror effect in the same way. And when you can, that starts to have a powerful effect. I think there's a deep principle that you're sharing there, which is...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that to say, do you have ideas of how we practically build systems that create resilience society? Are a lot of good things that you shared where there's like 15 different ways that we could enter this that are all interesting. So I'm trying to see which one will probably be most useful. Pick the one or two things that are least ridiculous. When you were mentioning...”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to war, which I think we talked about offline, is we often go to war with kind of governments, not with the people. You have to think about the kids of countries. See a soldier And because of what they experience, their interaction with the soldier, hate is born. When you're like eight years old, six years old, you lose your dad, you lose your mom. Lose a friend somebody close to you that want a really powerful externality that could be reduced to love, positive and negative is the hate that's born when you make decisions. And that's going to take fruition, that little seed is going to become a tree that then leads to the kind of destruction that we talk about. But in my sense, it's possible to reduce everything to a measure of how much love does this add to the world.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of them, the worse I become. And I'm aware of this, but I'm also aware that it for some reason is pleasant to watch those sometimes. And so for me to be able to self-report that to the YouTube algorithm, to the systems around me, and they ultimately try to optimize to make me the best person, the best version of myself, which I personally believe would make YouTube a lot more money because I'd be much more willing to spend time I need to have and give YouTube a lot more a lot more of my money. That's great for business and great for humanity because it'll make me a kinder person. It'll increase the love quotient, the love metric, and it'll make them a lot of money. I feel like everything is aligned. And so you should do that, not just for YouTube algorithm, but also for a military strategy for them to go to war or not, because one externality you can think of.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made me a better person, and some of them made me a worse person. Quite honestly, not for stupid reasons like I feel dumber, but because I do have a sense that that started me on a path. Of not being kind to other people. For example, I'll give you for my own, and I'm sorry for ranting, but maybe there's some usefulness to this kind of exploration of self. When I focus on creating, on programming, on science, I become a much deeper thinker and a kinder person to others. When I listen to too many, a little bit is good, but too many podcasts or videos about how our world is melting down or criticizing ridiculous people, the worst of the quote unquote woke, for example. There's all these groups that are misbehaving in fascinating ways because they've been corrupted by power. The more I watch criticism.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Rogan idea of the hero of your own movie. And just add that little bit of information. You have people, you have this happiness surveys of how you feel about the last five days. How'd you report your experience? You can lay out the set of videos. This kind of fascinating work. I don't know if you ever look at YouTube, the history of videos you've looked at. It's fascinating. It's very embarrassing for me. Like, you'll be like a lecture and then like a set of videos that I don't want anyone to know about, which is, which will be like, I don't know, maybe like five videos in a row where it looks like I watched the whole thing, which I probably did. I bought like how to cook a steak, even though, or just like the best chefs in the world cooking steaks. And I'm just sitting there watching it for no purpose whatsoever, wasting away my life or like funny cat videos or like legit's always a good one. And I could look back and rate which videos made me a better person and not. And I mean, on a more serious note, there's a bunch of conversations podcasts or lectures I've watched, which”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subset of the population, you're just trying to get a sense. It's very loose kind of understanding, but integrated deeply as part of the technology. Most of our tech is recommender systems. Most of the, sorry, not tech online interaction is driven by recommender systems that learn very little data about you and use that data based on mostly based on traces of your previous behavior to suggest future things. This is how Twitter, Facebook works. This is how AdSense for Google AdSense works. This is how Netflix, YouTube work, and so on. And for them to just track as opposed to engagement, how much you spend in a particular video, a particular site is also track, give you the technology to do self-report of what makes you feel good, what makes you grow as a person, of what makes you... Know the best version of yourself.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd prefer to hear less To hear some of them first, I think the idea I would have is to be a bit more rigorous in trying to measure the amount of Love you add or subtract from the world in second, third, fourth, fifth order effects. It's actually, I think, especially in the world of tech, quite doable. He just might not like. You know, the shareholders may not like that kind of metric, but it's pretty easy to measure. Perhaps half joking about love, but we could talk about just happiness and well-being, long-term well-being. Pretty easy for Facebook and for YouTube for all these companies to measure that. They do a lot of kinds of surveys they could do. I mean, there's very simple solutions here that you could just survey how, I mean, surveys are in some sense useless because they're, um,”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can say, well, but then that's the new problem, and humanity will innovate its way out of that. Well, I don't think that's paying attention to the fact that we can't keep up with exponential curves like that, nor do finite spaces allow exponential externalities forever. And this is why a lot of the smartest people thinking about this are thinking, well, no, I think we're totally screwed unless we can make a benevolent AI singleton that rules all of us. You know, guys like Ostrom and others thinking in those directions because they're like, how do humans try to do multipolarity and make it work? And I have a different answer of what I think it looks like that does have more to do with the love, but some applied social tech aligned with love.”
2021-06-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #191 – Daniel Schmachtenberger: Steering Civilization Away from Self-Destruction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source