Daniel Schmachtenberger

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 at http://civilizationemerging.com/media/ \*Note: I rarely log on here. Please pm me on FB or email me at [email protected] To engage with The Consileince Project, go to https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-consilience-project Please do not send me unsolicited professional offers. Thank you. He has an eclectic educational background, mostly from outside of institutional settings, in the natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy...with an emphasis in the epistemics needed to better approach ‘wicked’ problems, and the ethical considerations to inform the design criteria for adequate solutions. Daniel has participated in projects to survey the landscape of existential and catastrophic risks, advance forecasting and mitigation strategies, and develop capacities for the kinds of multi-agent coordination needed to implement sufficient solutions. Associated work has been done to synthesize and advance civilizational collapse and institutional decay models, insofar as they are useful in both scenario modeling and designing more resilient systems. That body of work also explored the social architectures that give rise to the coordination failures underneath and driving all catastrophic risk scenarios, and identified a finite set of generator functions (believed to be a complete set). Categorical solutions to those generator functions would solve for the class of collapse obsoleting the need for focus on isolated instances. Such solutions are believed to be achievable and would represent the kernel for a new and robust civilizational model...that has the capacity for enduring antifragility in the presence of the (destabilizing) power conferred by decentralized exponential technology. Advancing those models for long term viability, along with advancing the capacities for sense-making, design, and coordination needed to support the necessary nearer term transitional and protective work, is Daniel’s mission and focus.