thank you - though Ive read over half of those - I actually don't think Daniel would say these were foundational to his thinking or synthesis. Esp not the EP ones. But useful list - thanks
Agreed, there's only as much as you can extract from the written word, plus I think Daniel has integrated his total knowledge and understanding from many different sources and experiences and some original work of his own in form of basic research. These 100 might just be the tip of an iceberg.
A friend sent me the link to this podcast with a comment: "got 3.5 hours? worth listening to". The next day I wrote to her: "This was the most insightful podcast interview I have listened to in years! It's so dense in terms of ideas and eye-opening perspectives that I think I'll spend another 3.5 hours listening to it again. No kidding."
goes well with the Hospicing Modernity idea of needing to digest the lessons from the current era, and not rush into a new plan/ideology that just recreates the old mistakes
I like Schmactenberger's thinking, even if little of this was new to me, and he didn't leave me seeing much cause for optimism that humanity will break free of this "multi-polar trap". But I was disappointed that he didn't pursue the one exit ramp I could see in the whole discussion, which is that if (in the absence of an ethical compass) everything boils down to game theory, people (event he elites with power) can learn game theory and strategize our way out of the prisoner's dilemma kind of trap that we're in. Sorry that avenue was not pursued as a potential exit, as I didn't perceive any other.
Thanks for bringing this subject up, Nate. I have reacted to your request. Be prepared for cognitive dissonance! See anger as a signal that you might have misunderstood something you thought you understood!
Daniel is an extraordinary thinker, and this presentation is fascinating. I have thought about the need for regulation of new technologies that includes digital technologies across the range of areas of rapid development and deployment, He conceptualizes it well - the closest real world system I would compare it to is prescription pharmaceuticals. The FDA evaluates New Drug Applications for benefits, risks, and side effects, and has an ( ineffective) system for monitoring on an ongoing basis, after a drug is in use, evidence of previously undetected risks, or side effects. It costs (according to PhrMA), over a billion USD to get a new drug approved, so it is not an insignificant evaluation process. Unfortunately, any attempt to regulate for profit technologies is a difficult task, and PhrMa still manages to make profits from medicines that harm public health, or use enormous healthcare resources, without providing meaningful public health benefit. I have no idea if it is possible to create a system that de-monetizes the massive profits involved, given current patent laws. I wonder if that would facilitate a more effective approach to assessing for betterment, as distinguished from progress.
After all, it only took private for- profit entities about 30-40 years to destroy the American healthcare system.
Daniel takes conceptual leaps that I confess leave me a bit dazed and confused. For that reason, I wish he would provide some documentation for some of the anecdotal evidence he uses to support hypotheses. I agree that corporations are de facto "obligate sociopaths". It is true that corporations have tried to acquire and expand their personhood rights for many years. However, I could not find any evidence to support the assertion that the year after the 14th amendment was passed, 350 corporations, used it to try to expand their personhood status. The evidence I found asserted that after the amendment was passed in 1868, there was no further mention of its use regarding corporate personhood until 1886, when a note by the Chief Justice was added to a ruling that stated that the court believed that the 14th Amendment did give corporations personhood rights, and did not want to hear arguments regarding that question. That note, which was not a Court decision, was used as a "precedent" argument for expanding corporate personhood rights, despite a number of dissenting arguments by Court members in later related cases, culminating most recently in the egregious Citizens United decision. I welcome being found wrong. I do believe that when hypotheses are being put forward,, or arguments being made for regulatory processes, that the evidence base will be limited, and it is important to be sure that it is solid. There were a couple other assertions that I would like to see his evidence. However, I agree and support without hesitation the need for regulation of technologies that purport to be beneficial, unless there is a system in place to assess for possible risks, benefits and side effects. It is hard to argue that every technology of the industrial and digital revolutions have been beneficial, given the climate science , and the enormous suffering and death currently ongoing in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, due to extreme weather events made extreme by climate change, as well as the role that climate and energy instability is no doubt playing in the 2 tragic wars ongoing and threatening escalation. At the same time, it is important to remember the point Chris Keefer made (TGS 123), that the future without some of our technology is not a camping trip. I agree with Chris that an all-cause mortality rate of 50% of children by the age of 5 is a tragedy in any society. We are beginning, Bill McKibbens says, and he knows the issues as well as anyone, perhaps the most important last best 5 years to avoid a much harder, maybe lost, path to a prosperous (wellbeing, betterment, not technology, progress) future.
I thought that when Daniel was talking about Dunbar 1 (communities of 150 or so, where everybody knows, has a relationship with, everyone else), he was onto an important organizing construct for a way to organize such that we make choices to better our lives, rather than just complicate them.
The beginning of your discussion sounds a lot like basic ‘Game Theory’ There is a very interesting discussion of this on the Veritasium YouTube channel.
There are between 150-200 books behind Daniel.
I was naturally intrigued by some of the tiles.
So here's the list of 100 books I've been able to discern 👇
tldr; These titles reflect themes of science, philosophy, ethics, consciousness, and evolutionary biology among many other topics.
1. Egyptology - Emily Sands
2. Consciousness - Susan Blackmore
3. Spaces - John Harte
4. What If - Randall Munroe
5. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology - Robin Dunbar
6. Cosmology - Sean Carroll
7. The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
8. Theatre of the Mind - Daniel J. Siegel
9. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker
10. The Big Picture - Sean Carroll
11. Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne
12. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
13. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
14. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
15. Science and Religion - Alister McGrath
16. The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
17. Life Ascending - Nick Lane
18. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
19. The Logic of Science - Peter Godfrey-Smith
20. Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett
21. The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
22. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
23. The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
24. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
25. The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
26. The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris
27. Free Will - Sam Harris
28. The End of Faith - Sam Harris
29. Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky
30. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker
31. The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker
32. Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
33. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
34. The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow
35. The Information - James Gleick
36. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate - Manjit Kumar
37. Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
38. The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
39. The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore
40. The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins
41. The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
42. Collapse - Jared Diamond
43. The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker
44. The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt
45. The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
46. Moral Tribes - Joshua Greene
47. The Ethical Brain - Michael S. Gazzaniga
48. Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom
49. Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
50. Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
51. From Eternity to Here - Sean Carroll
52. The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
53. The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
54. The Conscious Mind - David Chalmers
55. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel Dennett
56. The Expanding Circle - Peter Singer
57. Animal Liberation - Peter Singer
58. The Quest for Consciousness - Christof Koch
59. The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
60. Good and Real - Gary L. Drescher
61. The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman
62. The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman
63. Why Does the World Exist? - Jim Holt
64. Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
65. Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell
66. The Vital Question - Nick Lane
67. The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
68. Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright
69. Waking Up - Sam Harris
70. The Moral Animal - Robert Wright
71. The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
72. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
73. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
74. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari
75. The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
76. How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil
77. The Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins
78. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
79. The Nature of Space and Time - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
80. Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
81. Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
82. The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard Feynman
83. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feynman
84. The Demon in the Machine - Paul Davies
85. The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweil
86. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
87. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
88. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
89. The Emerging Mind - Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
90. The Philosophy of Science - Samir Okasha
91. The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger
92. The User Illusion - Tor Nørretranders
93. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
94. The Accidental Universe - Alan Lightman
95. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky
96. The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menand
97. The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
98. I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
99. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
100. The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli
thank you - though Ive read over half of those - I actually don't think Daniel would say these were foundational to his thinking or synthesis. Esp not the EP ones. But useful list - thanks
Agreed, there's only as much as you can extract from the written word, plus I think Daniel has integrated his total knowledge and understanding from many different sources and experiences and some original work of his own in form of basic research. These 100 might just be the tip of an iceberg.
A friend sent me the link to this podcast with a comment: "got 3.5 hours? worth listening to". The next day I wrote to her: "This was the most insightful podcast interview I have listened to in years! It's so dense in terms of ideas and eye-opening perspectives that I think I'll spend another 3.5 hours listening to it again. No kidding."
“The mind that was conditioned by this kind of system can’t avoid making more of this kind of system…”
goes well with the Hospicing Modernity idea of needing to digest the lessons from the current era, and not rush into a new plan/ideology that just recreates the old mistakes
I like Schmactenberger's thinking, even if little of this was new to me, and he didn't leave me seeing much cause for optimism that humanity will break free of this "multi-polar trap". But I was disappointed that he didn't pursue the one exit ramp I could see in the whole discussion, which is that if (in the absence of an ethical compass) everything boils down to game theory, people (event he elites with power) can learn game theory and strategize our way out of the prisoner's dilemma kind of trap that we're in. Sorry that avenue was not pursued as a potential exit, as I didn't perceive any other.
Thanks for bringing this subject up, Nate. I have reacted to your request. Be prepared for cognitive dissonance! See anger as a signal that you might have misunderstood something you thought you understood!
https://odysee.com/@valsamverkan:3/I-react-to-Daniel-Schmachtenberger---Nate-Hagens-on--The-Wide-Boundary-Impacts-of-AI-:d
Would love a recorded redacted interview, or live. My time zone is CET. So 20:00 is usually ok.
Any hints as to when the paper will be published?
Daniel is an extraordinary thinker, and this presentation is fascinating. I have thought about the need for regulation of new technologies that includes digital technologies across the range of areas of rapid development and deployment, He conceptualizes it well - the closest real world system I would compare it to is prescription pharmaceuticals. The FDA evaluates New Drug Applications for benefits, risks, and side effects, and has an ( ineffective) system for monitoring on an ongoing basis, after a drug is in use, evidence of previously undetected risks, or side effects. It costs (according to PhrMA), over a billion USD to get a new drug approved, so it is not an insignificant evaluation process. Unfortunately, any attempt to regulate for profit technologies is a difficult task, and PhrMa still manages to make profits from medicines that harm public health, or use enormous healthcare resources, without providing meaningful public health benefit. I have no idea if it is possible to create a system that de-monetizes the massive profits involved, given current patent laws. I wonder if that would facilitate a more effective approach to assessing for betterment, as distinguished from progress.
After all, it only took private for- profit entities about 30-40 years to destroy the American healthcare system.
Daniel takes conceptual leaps that I confess leave me a bit dazed and confused. For that reason, I wish he would provide some documentation for some of the anecdotal evidence he uses to support hypotheses. I agree that corporations are de facto "obligate sociopaths". It is true that corporations have tried to acquire and expand their personhood rights for many years. However, I could not find any evidence to support the assertion that the year after the 14th amendment was passed, 350 corporations, used it to try to expand their personhood status. The evidence I found asserted that after the amendment was passed in 1868, there was no further mention of its use regarding corporate personhood until 1886, when a note by the Chief Justice was added to a ruling that stated that the court believed that the 14th Amendment did give corporations personhood rights, and did not want to hear arguments regarding that question. That note, which was not a Court decision, was used as a "precedent" argument for expanding corporate personhood rights, despite a number of dissenting arguments by Court members in later related cases, culminating most recently in the egregious Citizens United decision. I welcome being found wrong. I do believe that when hypotheses are being put forward,, or arguments being made for regulatory processes, that the evidence base will be limited, and it is important to be sure that it is solid. There were a couple other assertions that I would like to see his evidence. However, I agree and support without hesitation the need for regulation of technologies that purport to be beneficial, unless there is a system in place to assess for possible risks, benefits and side effects. It is hard to argue that every technology of the industrial and digital revolutions have been beneficial, given the climate science , and the enormous suffering and death currently ongoing in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, due to extreme weather events made extreme by climate change, as well as the role that climate and energy instability is no doubt playing in the 2 tragic wars ongoing and threatening escalation. At the same time, it is important to remember the point Chris Keefer made (TGS 123), that the future without some of our technology is not a camping trip. I agree with Chris that an all-cause mortality rate of 50% of children by the age of 5 is a tragedy in any society. We are beginning, Bill McKibbens says, and he knows the issues as well as anyone, perhaps the most important last best 5 years to avoid a much harder, maybe lost, path to a prosperous (wellbeing, betterment, not technology, progress) future.
I thought that when Daniel was talking about Dunbar 1 (communities of 150 or so, where everybody knows, has a relationship with, everyone else), he was onto an important organizing construct for a way to organize such that we make choices to better our lives, rather than just complicate them.
Thank you for this session with Daniel Schmachtenberger. I look forward to the paper his organization is about to release.
The beginning of your discussion sounds a lot like basic ‘Game Theory’ There is a very interesting discussion of this on the Veritasium YouTube channel.
https://youtu.be/mScpHTIi-kM?si=jKABRKretRbx3FuX