The War On Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger

[Hugh Johnson]

 

[ecstatichamster]

Can you summarize?

 

[dfspcc20]

I've been enjoying Daniel Schmachtenberger's writing and podcasts/videos lately as well. It'd be awesome to get him and @haidut to record a conversation.

Can you summarize?

Not quite a summary of what OP posted, but here's something re: sensemaking Daniel posted on his FB recently.

"Clearest signs that you live in a filter bubble and have damaged sense-making: the people on the other side of the political spectrum seem very cognitively/psychologically far away from you...you have high certainty about your opinions (despite relatively low real expertise)...and most of your friends agree with you."

 

[dfspcc20]

Here are my notes/summary (which, probably to the chagrin of Daniel Schmachtenberger, have some form of bias and is further polluting the information ecology)

- The universe is too big and complex for any one person to make perfect sense of everything themselves. Thus we outsource our sense-making, at least to some degree, to authorities or the collective. That is, unless you're able to analyze all the primary data for every issue yourself, making an effort to understand how that data was collected, what might have been omitted or obscured, what conflicts of interest there might have been (either overt or unintentional), etc. Since there are a finite number of minutes in a day and a lifetime, most people simply don't have time to do that. Another example- if you're reading my summary instead of just watching the video.

- There are built-in incentives, either at the individual or group level, to promote disinformation that obscures sense-making. Some amount of disinformation could be considered natural and part of the evolution of things, but the human trait of abstraction greatly accelerates its creation. Lots about rival-risk dynamics, zero-sum games, game theory, etc., discussed here, all of which I claim no expertise on. Of particular concern is the incentive for disinformation created by in-group/out-group dynamics.

- All media now is essentially narrative warfare. It'd be a challenge to find any outlet now that doesn't have some pull or agenda other than only providing truthful information. Similarly, marketing (as we know it) is disinformation.

- Advances in technology make it easy for anyone nowadays to pollute the (dis)information ecology. And its only getting worse.

- All perspectives have some percentage of "signal", some percentage of "noise".

- The goal should be to take in as many perspectives as possible. Then apply a sort of Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis to come to a higher level view. Even if you can't agree to what that perspective is saying is "true", can you at least see why it would be compelling?

- Example using a 3D cylinder, which could be a circle or rectangle if projected in 2D. Neither 2D shape by itself, or even a middle-ground of the two, could represent the true nature of a cylinder.

- Extending that example to political left and political right. In the most general sense, the right favors autonomy of the individual, in a bottom-up sort of way, while the left is more towards empowering the community/collective, being more top-down. Both sides have signal and noise. Debating among these two sides is like arguing whether the circle or rectangle better represent the cylinder, and just leads to more disinformation and narrative warfare. The more ideal would be some synthesis that sees things at a higher level and would probably lead to something never before implemented by human society.

- Organisms as a whole are an example of something that can't be considered purely bottom-up nor top-down, but rather a synthesis of both. Competition within an organism is the hallmark of cancer and leads to self-termination. Cooperation leads to greater complexity.


Now on to part 2. Here's to a commitment to earnestness & sincerity, with the only enemy being bias in any form