Is There a War on Sensemaking?
Reviewing Daniel Schmachtenberger’s Rebel Wisdom Latest Interview
Rebel Wisdom is doing its best over the past year to inform us that there is indeed a war on sensemaking. On Sept 29, 2020, Daniel Schmachtenberger was interviewed for his 5th time on the topic.
As with most of Daniel’s interviews on Rebel Wisdom, there’s lots to unpack. As noted in his initial War on Sensemaking interview, Daniel’s distinguishes that what most people call news is really propaganda. It’s “narrative warfare” for some agency. And they aren’t good sources of sensemaking.
Daniel asked “Where are the high signal, low noise sources of information that I can offload some of the high complexity of making sense of the world to?” He continues to explore the answers with us.
In his first interview, Daniel doesn’t hold back that the answer is really sad. “I don’t know any sources that are high signal, low noise across lots of areas. Why is that? And what would it take to fix that. What would it take to make a world that had an intact information ecology?”
“Well that requires understanding why the current information ecology is as broken as it is.How do we make good choices, if we don’t have good sensemaking? Well obviously we can’t.”
He states it clearly, “Due to increasing technological capacity, we’re making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sensemaking to inform those choices. Which is kind of running increasingly fast through the woods, increasingly blind.
“How do we actually fix our own sensemaking?”
He begins this latest interview saying, “In the series so far we’ve discussed a number of aspects of why the the information ecology is broken, why it’s really hard to make sense of what’s going on in the world, why people are coming to such radically polarized positions on almost everything.”
“Why is that consequential for our ability to make good choices or to do anything to come to a base understanding of what is. Will address some solutions at end, but spend a chunk recapping the problem space?”
He makes an excellent point about how some perceived the events that transpired earlier this year, “When Covid came a lot of people were hoping that could be a shared enemy for the world, it could unite the world. It was a very naive hope that people were having at the beginning. We’ve seen almost as far from that as we can see. There’s polarization across the whole space.”
I believe there’s still room to be hopeful. Daniel does a very good job at looking at a broader view of what the pandemic indicates. “Covid was just big enough issue to start to set off the systemic fragilities that were already in place. Before Covid, we were already talking about the breakdown in sense making that was already occurring… increasing the speed that it was being actuated.”
I’m not blindly hopeful though. Like Daniel, I believe it’s important to accurate assess we’re at and acknowledge what people are perceiving. “Not just some people saying that there might be impending catastrophe, but that we’re in the process of that, and that it’s not just within one area, it’s cascading.”
“Why is our assessment of the problems one of the main causes of the problems themselves and the worsening of the problems? What would it take for us to have a shared assessment that makes solutions possible at all?” These are vital questions that I rarely hear anyone asking. Daniel seems to understand that this is a huge piece of the puzzle if any positive changes are to be made.
“There is nearly maximum polarization that is felt to be nearly maximally consequential. Which is a basis for not just social tension, but a movement toward warfare.” Kind of sounds like the state of affairs currently in the US. Yet there doesn’t seem to be enough voices taking this approach when discussing the predicament that we’re in.
Daniel uses a current example, “Everyone has always felt that presidential elections are consequential. Maybe they’ve even felt they’re more consequential than they really are. Right now the percentage of the population that thinks it’s not just consequential (this election), but is existential to the republic itself, is very high.”
I think taking this expanded outlook on the situation, gives some much needed perspective. “Both sides think it’s the end of the republic if the other guy gets in. And they both think the other side is going to steal it.” Leaving Daniel, and all of us, the unsettling question and assumption, “So what happens when the election comes? And it’s not held as valid, and it’s held as existential. And we have these mounting tensions already.”
The more he expounds upon this perspective of what’s happening, the more it sounds blatantly obviious. “The more people whose fundamental needs aren’t met by a system, they becoming more desperately willing to act against the system. Having massive unemployment is a very unstable situation for a system. No one really has the ability to process any of this well, nor is the reporting oriented to try to process it in an adequate way.”
“For the most part, people have traded epistemology for tribalism. Meaning, they’re giving up on trying to a rigorous job of making sense of things themselves.” This reminds me of many conversations I see amongst friends and peers when they are surprised by people in their networks taking standpoints or making certain claims.”
I’ve been questioning most of the people in my network. I’m not so much asking if they’re doing their research, rather are they doing their inner homework. What I mean by this is what Daniel describes next: “Take a narrative, break it into individual propositions, what evidence do I have to verify It or falsity it. Very few people use formal epistemic process. So what they’re really doing is paying attention to what feels true.”
The more I hear Daniel speak on sensemaking, the more I feel he’s bringing the depth and breadth necessary to address the complexity of the concerns posed to us. “Humans have been here a long time, but the thing we call civilization, larger scale coordination — only a tiny percentage of those who’ve ever lived, lived in something like a republic or a democracy.”
He goes on to say. “They almost all lived in futurism or monarchy, or some kind of top-down autocratic system. The proposition of a republic or democracy is actually a wild proposition.” And we are now dealing with some of the ramifications of that wild proposition, as we have before. Things is now, we have so many voices, so much information, too much noise.
“The cultural enlightenments had at least a couple of things in common. Like more participatory governance or high value for classical education for everyone.” This is another component that is getting lost in the mix. How to we bring each person up to speed?
Daniel proposes, “Let everyone have a sense of how to know the true, plus the good and the beautiful. An integrated sense of those, and understand what types of systems worked and didn’t work in the past.”
“If everyone can basically sense base reality on their own well — which has to be trained — and then, there was also the value of the Socratic dialogue. In the Socratic dialogue everyone is being trained to be able to take every perspective, to argue all sides.” Does your average person even know what Socratic dialogue is? I believe it is helpful, but do people want it?
“Being trained in seeking to understand the perspective of others and actually be able to argue them even better. Which is steelmanning.” I’ve noticed in his interviews, that Daniel often brings up the method of steelmanning. Once again, I have to ask, are people going to be willing to put in the work that comes with making arguments structurally sound?
