Daniel Schmachtenberger
Daniel Schmachtenberger’s central interest is long term civilization design: developing better collective capacities for sense-making and meaning-making, to inform higher quality choice-making…towards a world commensurate with our higher values and potentials.
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 viable 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. Categorical solutions to those generator functions would solve for the causes of collapse, obsoleting the need to focus on specific instances. Such solutions are believed to be achievable and would represent the kernel of 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.
He has also done work in functional medicine and biotech, education and human development, and advised private and public sector leaders on how to address complex scenarios across a number of sectors.