A Teacher
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Our civilization’s existential risks are downstream of broken sensemaking and misaligned incentives, and only better collective choice-making can avert collapse.
The transmission
Daniel Schmachtenberger is an American systems thinker and founding member of The Consilience Project, which focuses on improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
He is known for articulating the ‘metacrisis,’ the idea that humanity’s many crises share common generator functions in misaligned incentives and degraded information ecologies. His work spans catastrophic and existential risk, civilization design, and the question of how groups can make wiser collective decisions.
What they gave
The metacrisis: Synthesized the idea that humanity’s many crises share common “generator functions” in misaligned incentives and degraded information ecologies.
- Sensemaking: Co-founded The Consilience Project to improve public dialogue and the quality of collective sense-making.
- Existential risk as systemic: Reframed catastrophic risk as a problem of incentive design rather than isolated threats.
- Civilization design: Asks how groups can make wiser collective choices, treating society as a system to be consciously redesigned.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Cybernetics and systems theory; Buckminster Fuller; E. O. Wilson’s notion of consilience; existential risk studies.
- Taught / Influenced: The sensemaking and “metacrisis” discourse; the civilization-design community working on collective choice-making.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- The War on Sensemaking2019
- Bend Not Break2022