Daniel Schmachtenberger & Jim talk about his newly launched project, The Consilience Project...

Daniel Schmachtenberger & Jim talk about his newly launched project, The Consilience Project. They start by covering some background for the project: why start it, primary focuses, cultural renaissance, the role of education & press, eroding knowledge commons, rapidly changing culture & scales, and learning from history. They then talk about the project's approaches & strategies: bottom-up problems-solving processes, understanding externalities, identifying core problems, content strategy, narrative navigation, post-tribalism, epistemic commons, meta news, fighting confirmation bias, modern memetic dynamics, social media moderation, out-group reading, civic virtue, post-modernism, science, 1st 2nd & 3rd person epistemologies, the target audience, being a media role model, community building, and much more.

Episode Transcript

The Consilience Project

JRS: EP80 Daniel Schmachtenberger on Better Sensemaking

JRS: EP7 Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Evolution of Technology

Past Zak Stein JRS Episodes

JRS: EP84 William Perry & Tom Collina on The Nuclear Button

Consilience article, "Democracy and the Epistemic Commons"

Consilience article, "Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century"

Consilience article, "Were Pallets of Bricks Planted at Black Lives Matter Protests?"

The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote

JRS: EP107 Tristan Harris on Our Social Dilemma

First Things Journal

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal. Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.