The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger

> “Courage is the solution to despair. Reason can provide no answers.” –Ernst Toller (First Reformed, 2017) I’ve felt the despair of this article for a time (and the quote above gave me some peace), but some recent hope came from Daniel Schmachtenberger[1]. He postulates that our conception of debate in our current information ecology selects and optimizes for bias. He refers to the Hegelian dialectic as an alternative to debate—of an earnest synthesis from understanding both a thesis and its antithesis, resolving paradox with a higher order model. I’ve heard this described as steel-manning[1] another’s argument to find its signal (as opposed to straw-manning the noise). But Schmachtenberger, as well as Bret Weinstein I believe, proposes that the game-theoretic win/lose dynamic of our current system is so entrenched that it really selects for this type of narrative warfare which doesn’t promote this type of open and honest information ecology for this to really work yet. So there’s something to their post-game-theoretic frameworks (Bret’s “Game B”) that make me a lot less fatalistic and anarchist about the whole complexity game. [1] The War on Sensemaking: [this video] [2] a.k.a purva paksha: [link]

Thanks for the resources, especially the Bonhoeffer theory and the nice feedback. I do appreciate it. I can also only return the favor, being able to come to an agreement on such points is really good news and i found this quite beneficial as well. The difficulty of it (conflict in speech is just so much more easy and enjoyable) is why i have so high hopes for technology. Because you wont just help with understanding but being more easy to understand. Which means getting more control about how you frame stuff without just trying to influence your conversation partner. I am not so optimistic about education beyond a base level though, getting a grip of framing stuff, and not just reacting, is just very difficult no matter how much you meditate, at least for idiots like myself. Schmachtenberger [0] is proposing that same approach with the stuff around "rule omega", but as you can take from the close to 10 hours of videos and not making much visible progress since, you are kind of trying to build a new non-stupid human. When it comes to possible solutions, cooperative minimum is key imho. Which likely means the solution cant be aimed at gaining political influence or monetary benefits. Because people react to such attempts of influence as well. And as as with every tool, there will be attempts of weaponization. Which gets us to conflict again, which makes the experience everywhere more shit. In case anyone is wondering about the poverty point, its so people get the option to not

First off, thanks for mentioning Karl Popper and the media literacy theory. Will have to look into that. I wish you the best here. Have been thinking about the issue as well and have been drifting more and more in the direction dealing with human error / aiding human thinking by just raising the bar abit without trying to find completeness and focusing on acceptability. Fixing the stuff that should be easiest. So looking at the description of errors and and how to communicate them in a sensible way. A minimum consensus based safety focused approach with capsuled complexity seems to be the way to go. A few perspectives you may or may not have heard of and find interesting in this context. In the spirit of capsuled complexity and accessibility with good podcasts / videos: Example for the concept and power of capsuled complexity with the 5 level explanation series from WIRED [link] You already mentioned information pollution so you might be familiar with the whole military perspective, from operations in the information environment / cognitive warfare, Diss/Miss Information and missing context, psychographic advertisement, ODAA Loop and the research coming out of IBMs Watson by Juliane Gallinas with her Ted Talk about "(General)Patton in a Box" [link] [link] If things shift into a game theoretical perspective its also always worth while reminding people that even psychopaths like drinkable tap water. There is some win-win stuff. (Air) Accident investigations and crew resource ma