Editing 27: Daniel Schmachtenberger - On Avoiding Apocalypses
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Hello, this is Eric with a few thoughts for our housekeeping section this week. As this is our second episode to be released during a bizarre and near global patchwork of local quarantines. I wanted to update you on my evolving thinking and understanding surrounding our shared pandemic. But perhaps more importantly, I want to begin putting this response to the virus in the context of what we've already talked about on the portal. In particular, the disk or distributed idea suppression complex introduced in Episode 18, appears to be in full swing. So how do we know that this is happening? Well, Twitter and this is just as an example, has now refined their terms of service to broaden their definition of harm itself to address in their words, and I quote, content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports. We will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners including public health authorities and governments Continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content. Under this new guidance, we will require people to remove tweets. Now, of course, the pandemic that sounds sensible, at least to my ears. In such a situation who wants marginal gadflies, like, I don't know Mike cernovich or the infamous mensches mold bug, aka Curtis Ervin, contradicting the mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio or the washington post at a time crying out for coordinated and authoritative response. Well, here's the awkward part. Many of the people who call this epidemic early and correctly were the very marginal internet personalities that the legacy media folks love to derive as trolls grifters and gadflies. As for the mayor of New York City, well, after cernovich and mold bug had correctly called for drastic action. Bill deblasio wrote, I'm encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives and get out on the town despite Coronavirus and that was an early March. A sentiment that was echoed by the Washington Post viewed concern over the virus as a kind of neurosis that had to be addressed psychologically. In short, the gated institutional narrative or gin was not close to being the first to see COVID as the giant threat requiring a planetary response. It was those outside the jinn that not only saw this early, but prove that it was seeable early by many different individuals who generally seem to sit outside the institutional and respectable worlds. So just why was this? Well, first of all, the portal has argued many times before that we've had an almost universally unworkable leadership class now in place for just under 50 years, then it arose to disguise the end of the post war economic growth regime. This is a collection of people who have refactored the institutions that they've led within our system specifically to evade the embedded growth obligations or egos that were set in the previous era, and who rewarded each other generally for doing exactly the wrong things in terms of the public good with an end to end Retirement the same people have been promoted for borrowing against the future and playing games of Russian Roulette with financial markets and healthcare, while self dealing within the system that they were handed stewards for the generations to come. serving a false god of fake economic efficiency that reliably and deliberately fails to adequately incorporate actual economics like negative externalities, by Norman Morgenstern, sub utility functions, Principal agent problems moral hazard etc, etc. Our ubiquitous economists have hidden behind the mask of technocrats working for the public good while merely pretending to practice their own profession. Healthcare mandarins to regularly ignore the warnings coming out of their own literature. I mean, heading over to Google Scholar, which readiness our or hospital head could forget titles like mechanical ventilation in an airborne epidemic by fula in 2008, or preparing intensive care for the next pandemic influenza by Taylor Kane and Robert Fowler in 2019. Were those back to back hits of Meltzer at all stockpiling ventilators for influenza pandemic. Makes and estimates of the demand for mechanical ventilation in the United States during an influenza pandemic in 2017, and 2015, respectively. In short, we got here not because we couldn't foresee this future. In fact, we extensively studied it. We got here because we decided to ignore the future that we knew was coming. The specific class of people that we had at the helm of our institutions were constitutionally incapable of putting their foot down and asserting that we needed deeper reserves in order to handle what they called surge capacity. So do I know what's going on? What I said during this section of our last episode still holds true this week. My continuing discussions with a number of people I respect deeply seems surprisingly inconclusive to me even at this late date. So my mind wanders to the second order question of why it would be so difficult to sketch a straightforward narrative to guide us. In fact, Dr. Peter T. His most recent video evidence is some of this confusion where he shares that as a physician, he feels so spun around by what he is hearing that even he is forced to think in political Rather than medical or scientific terms to explain the situation. to oversimplify slightly, there are three great risks with the COVID virus, one of under reaction, one of overreaction and one of inappropriate reaction. The first threatens an enormous body count from the virus with severe respiratory and other damage to many of the recovered. The second threatens a worldwide depression which could well lead to armed clashes and even wars of various sizes. The last leads to many of our efforts being wasted or even captured by profiteers at a time when we are demanded not to deeply question the coordinating authorities. And oddly, we are being prepared to participate in both under an overreaction simultaneously, just as many of us are worrying about allocations of financial assistance that are now valued in the trillions. I mean, this is crazy at some level, no, we are somehow discussing ill conceived multi trillion dollar systems packages at the same time as we are being ready to go back to work while also hearing that New York is now apocalyptic. I mean, that's pretty confusing. We're going to transfer it vast amounts of wealth. So please know that everything will be fine when you get back to work shortly, but in the meantime, the borough of Queens is experiencing Armageddon, even by high school dating standards, that's a lot of mixed and conflicting messages. Now what could explain this odd state of affairs? I found myself compelled by a very simple idea from PostScript, I cannot easily escape the idea straightforward. What if our leadership is treating this as much as an accountability crisis as a medical one when it comes to their actions? I mean, what if the issue over which we are being quarantined isn't actually the number of deaths they are trying to prevent, but the type of deaths perhaps there is one special category of death then that our leaders are more afraid of than all others for reasons of accountability rather than simple loss of life. In order to explore this idea, it might help to make it somewhat concrete. Therefore, imagine that you would drafted a blank tweet on Twitter called New York blue check deathless for at least mildly well known accounts that you follow from New York state that are eventually brought low by the COVID virus and that it didn't has no other content. Of course, it would start out blank. But now imagine that every time one of these account owners dies of COVID, you plan to add them to your soon to be growing list. That's pretty morbid, but hey, it's now a pandemic after all. Oddly, these aren't even really the death that I'm talking about quite yet. Perhaps the first few are old people who have lived long and full lives. But as your list begins to fill up, there may come a first gruesome death that happened to a vital younger person who desperately needed a ventilator or an ICU bed or a trained MD or nurse to have a fighting chance. Let us call these triage deaths if they result from a missing resource that could have and should have been stocked for just such emergencies. These losses are beginning to outline the class of death that I believe may now be driving this difficult to understand response from our political and medical leadership. While deaths from the virus may be tragic, these specific triage deaths may be considered career ending deaths of accountability for medical, scientific, business and political leaders who specifically failed to heed warnings from the group studying our preparedness. As such, they may have mattered most in determining the shape of our current response as they are all deaths that come from failing to implement copius previous work in identifying our vulnerabilities meant to shape our disaster preparedness. These would be quite bad because they would involve people that we feel we know. But it could actually get much worse for our leaders than that. If you were now to swap out the blue check requirement and exchange it instead for I don't know the most sympathetic person you could imagine. What happens when death swoops down on a young girl of eight named aroona? Who needs a ventilator desperately but can't get one? Or perhaps the entire Gomez family is turned away from a Queen's er are made to wait for ICU beds that never materialized while there's still time to save three out of their four members? I mean, what if it is these triage deaths which are actually closer to negligent homicide than mere viral losses that are actually terrifying our leaders into draconian action rather than the total Have dead as they say. This hypothesis has the advantage of at least being consistent with the otherwise confusing and seemingly conflicting themes developed before. burdens from our leaders who are caught having utterly failed in their mission to keep us prepared would have to be shifted on to our entire society as a whole. Think about it, the public would be asked for broad participation in something like flatten the curve and why to cover for the lack of the same ICU beds, masks PP, and ventilators that were called for in numerous academic papers over the last 20 years studying just such viral pandemic scenarios. I mean, it's really quite close, as the authorities now scramble at topspeed to finally get the missing resources in place that should have been banked all along. They would also simultaneously be preparing us to go back to work to risk regular viral rather than triage deaths. Just as soon as the shortfalls could be made up. There doesn't seem to be a highly credible plan to defeat the virus to see the implications of this tree. Death avoidance hypothesis, conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that all of the rate limiting resources for efficient ICU treatment were suddenly parachuted out on pallets from helicopters all over the world. The question is, would we continue to shelter in place given that we have no cure or vaccine? Or would we be told to toughen up and go back to work? Now? I don't know the answer. But I believe the question is not devoid of interest. Think about it, I will as well. | Hello, this is Eric with a few thoughts for our housekeeping section this week. As this is our second episode to be released during a bizarre and near global patchwork of local quarantines. I wanted to update you on my evolving thinking and understanding surrounding our shared pandemic. But perhaps more importantly, I want to begin putting this response to the virus in the context of what we've already talked about on the portal. In particular, the disk or distributed idea suppression complex introduced in Episode 18, appears to be in full swing. So how do we know that this is happening? Well, Twitter and this is just as an example, has now refined their terms of service to broaden their definition of harm itself to address in their words, and I quote, content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources of global and local public health information. Rather than reports. We will enforce this in close coordination with trusted partners including public health authorities and governments Continue to use and consult with information from those sources when reviewing content. Under this new guidance, we will require people to remove tweets. Now, of course, the pandemic that sounds sensible, at least to my ears. In such a situation who wants marginal gadflies, like, I don't know Mike cernovich or the infamous mensches mold bug, aka Curtis Ervin, contradicting the mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio or the washington post at a time crying out for coordinated and authoritative response. Well, here's the awkward part. Many of the people who call this epidemic early and correctly were the very marginal internet personalities that the legacy media folks love to derive as trolls grifters and gadflies. As for the mayor of New York City, well, after cernovich and mold bug had correctly called for drastic action. Bill deblasio wrote, I'm encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives and get out on the town despite Coronavirus and that was an early March. A sentiment that was echoed by the Washington Post viewed concern over the virus as a kind of neurosis that had to be addressed psychologically. In short, the gated institutional narrative or gin was not close to being the first to see COVID as the giant threat requiring a planetary response. It was those outside the jinn that not only saw this early, but prove that it was seeable early by many different individuals who generally seem to sit outside the institutional and respectable worlds. So just why was this? Well, first of all, the portal has argued many times before that we've had an almost universally unworkable leadership class now in place for just under 50 years, then it arose to disguise the end of the post war economic growth regime. This is a collection of people who have refactored the institutions that they've led within our system specifically to evade the embedded growth obligations or egos that were set in the previous era, and who rewarded each other generally for doing exactly the wrong things in terms of the public good with an end to end Retirement the same people have been promoted for borrowing against the future and playing games of Russian Roulette with financial markets and healthcare, while self dealing within the system that they were handed stewards for the generations to come. serving a false god of fake economic efficiency that reliably and deliberately fails to adequately incorporate actual economics like negative externalities, by Norman Morgenstern, sub utility functions, Principal agent problems moral hazard etc, etc. Our ubiquitous economists have hidden behind the mask of technocrats working for the public good while merely pretending to practice their own profession. Healthcare mandarins to regularly ignore the warnings coming out of their own literature. I mean, heading over to Google Scholar, which readiness our or hospital head could forget titles like mechanical ventilation in an airborne epidemic by fula in 2008, or preparing intensive care for the next pandemic influenza by Taylor Kane and Robert Fowler in 2019. Were those back to back hits of Meltzer at all stockpiling ventilators for influenza pandemic. Makes and estimates of the demand for mechanical ventilation in the United States during an influenza pandemic in 2017, and 2015, respectively. In short, we got here not because we couldn't foresee this future. In fact, we extensively studied it. We got here because we decided to ignore the future that we knew was coming. The specific class of people that we had at the helm of our institutions were constitutionally incapable of putting their foot down and asserting that we needed deeper reserves in order to handle what they called surge capacity. So do I know what's going on? What I said during this section of our last episode still holds true this week. My continuing discussions with a number of people I respect deeply seems surprisingly inconclusive to me even at this late date. So my mind wanders to the second order question of why it would be so difficult to sketch a straightforward narrative to guide us. In fact, Dr. Peter T. His most recent video evidence is some of this confusion where he shares that as a physician, he feels so spun around by what he is hearing that even he is forced to think in political Rather than medical or scientific terms to explain the situation. to oversimplify slightly, there are three great risks with the COVID virus, one of under reaction, one of overreaction and one of inappropriate reaction. The first threatens an enormous body count from the virus with severe respiratory and other damage to many of the recovered. The second threatens a worldwide depression which could well lead to armed clashes and even wars of various sizes. The last leads to many of our efforts being wasted or even captured by profiteers at a time when we are demanded not to deeply question the coordinating authorities. And oddly, we are being prepared to participate in both under an overreaction simultaneously, just as many of us are worrying about allocations of financial assistance that are now valued in the trillions. I mean, this is crazy at some level, no, we are somehow discussing ill conceived multi trillion dollar systems packages at the same time as we are being ready to go back to work while also hearing that New York is now apocalyptic. I mean, that's pretty confusing. We're going to transfer it vast amounts of wealth. So please know that everything will be fine when you get back to work shortly, but in the meantime, the borough of Queens is experiencing Armageddon, even by high school dating standards, that's a lot of mixed and conflicting messages. Now what could explain this odd state of affairs? I found myself compelled by a very simple idea from PostScript, I cannot easily escape the idea straightforward. What if our leadership is treating this as much as an accountability crisis as a medical one when it comes to their actions? I mean, what if the issue over which we are being quarantined isn't actually the number of deaths they are trying to prevent, but the type of deaths perhaps there is one special category of death then that our leaders are more afraid of than all others for reasons of accountability rather than simple loss of life. In order to explore this idea, it might help to make it somewhat concrete. Therefore, imagine that you would drafted a blank tweet on Twitter called New York blue check deathless for at least mildly well known accounts that you follow from New York state that are eventually brought low by the COVID virus and that it didn't has no other content. Of course, it would start out blank. But now imagine that every time one of these account owners dies of COVID, you plan to add them to your soon to be growing list. That's pretty morbid, but hey, it's now a pandemic after all. Oddly, these aren't even really the death that I'm talking about quite yet. Perhaps the first few are old people who have lived long and full lives. But as your list begins to fill up, there may come a first gruesome death that happened to a vital younger person who desperately needed a ventilator or an ICU bed or a trained MD or nurse to have a fighting chance. Let us call these triage deaths if they result from a missing resource that could have and should have been stocked for just such emergencies. These losses are beginning to outline the class of death that I believe may now be driving this difficult to understand response from our political and medical leadership. While deaths from the virus may be tragic, these specific triage deaths may be considered career ending deaths of accountability for medical, scientific, business and political leaders who specifically failed to heed warnings from the group studying our preparedness. As such, they may have mattered most in determining the shape of our current response as they are all deaths that come from failing to implement copius previous work in identifying our vulnerabilities meant to shape our disaster preparedness. These would be quite bad because they would involve people that we feel we know. But it could actually get much worse for our leaders than that. If you were now to swap out the blue check requirement and exchange it instead for I don't know the most sympathetic person you could imagine. What happens when death swoops down on a young girl of eight named aroona? Who needs a ventilator desperately but can't get one? Or perhaps the entire Gomez family is turned away from a Queen's er are made to wait for ICU beds that never materialized while there's still time to save three out of their four members? I mean, what if it is these triage deaths which are actually closer to negligent homicide than mere viral losses that are actually terrifying our leaders into draconian action rather than the total Have dead as they say. This hypothesis has the advantage of at least being consistent with the otherwise confusing and seemingly conflicting themes developed before. burdens from our leaders who are caught having utterly failed in their mission to keep us prepared would have to be shifted on to our entire society as a whole. Think about it, the public would be asked for broad participation in something like flatten the curve and why to cover for the lack of the same ICU beds, masks PP, and ventilators that were called for in numerous academic papers over the last 20 years studying just such viral pandemic scenarios. I mean, it's really quite close, as the authorities now scramble at topspeed to finally get the missing resources in place that should have been banked all along. They would also simultaneously be preparing us to go back to work to risk regular viral rather than triage deaths. Just as soon as the shortfalls could be made up. There doesn't seem to be a highly credible plan to defeat the virus to see the implications of this tree. Death avoidance hypothesis, conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that all of the rate limiting resources for efficient ICU treatment were suddenly parachuted out on pallets from helicopters all over the world. The question is, would we continue to shelter in place given that we have no cure or vaccine? Or would we be told to toughen up and go back to work? Now? I don't know the answer. But I believe the question is not devoid of interest. Think about it, I will as well. | ||
This episode introduces a relatively unknown guest to our portal audience. Now many of you are familiar with the concept of true fame versus other kinds of fame. For example, there's big in Europe or internet famous Well, in a certain West Coast subculture there is a concept of California famous and such names would include Laura Deming Michael Vasser Elliott street koski Alex screen currently in federal prison, Jordan green Hall Julia Gala. Justin Harris Daniel bark. Hey, Tom Chee, Grant Sanderson, Rick Doblin Brett Victor and many others. My guest on this episode is my friend Daniel maakten. Berger an important node in the system. Now the odd thing about Daniel is that wherever he or I found ourselves riffing with others on topics existential, someone would often tell us about the other, and that we needed to become friends as well. And I think that was probably a pretty good call on their part. I have sat on this episode for months, however, because I was hoping that I would have a second chance to record with Daniel given that he was on very little sleep from the night before this discussion was recorded. However, we now find ourselves in a viral outbreak and Daniel is one of the few people I deal with trying to make progress on how humans can have a permanent future on the small and dangerous planet, particularly amidst the fatal temptations of nuclear and biological warfare, which I have termed the twin nuclei problem elsewhere. Now, the coronavirus may or may not turn out to be related to laboratory strains, but the problem problems at poses and foreshadows are directly within or adjacent to Daniel's area of focus. Daniel in particular favors the wisdom and design branch of the human fate decision tree, a branch that I think probably deserves the second most attention after my personal favorite, which is the need for new physics with the possibility of escape to the distant cosmos. That is, Daniel is searching for something like the wisdom needed to re engineer a non rival risk or anti rivalries society to live in harmony with its newfound godlike powers. Sometimes the search for a so called escape through wisdom goes into the name of game B. Now the idea behind game B is something like the following. Natural and sexual selection must be assumed to have engineered us for a cycle of competition and misery which we might term game a played read of tooth and claw under the law of the jungle. Game B is by contrast, a mythical second state where the agents are originally built within game a teach themselves to do something far less brutal rivalries unsustainable and wasteful, but without themselves getting out competed by those who wish to remain in game a, as such game be falls clearly within the confines of the so called human potential movement. While I have taken an interest in this counterculture, I am not myself a part of it is I fear that it does not fully make sense to me that game B is really a possibility. Nevertheless, the quest for a less rivalrous world is probably a noble one, and one of which I'm at least partially personally supportive. In any event, I thought that this is the episode that is probably most in keeping with the semi apocalyptic mood that many of us find ourselves within during these days of quarantine. I don't know if it will be everyone's cup of tea. But I think Daniel has many interesting perspectives. And it is a pleasure to introduce him to our portal community. So please sit back and relax as we bring you an uninterrupted discussion with Daniel | This episode introduces a relatively unknown guest to our portal audience. Now many of you are familiar with the concept of true fame versus other kinds of fame. For example, there's big in Europe or internet famous Well, in a certain West Coast subculture there is a concept of California famous and such names would include Laura Deming Michael Vasser Elliott street koski Alex screen currently in federal prison, Jordan green Hall Julia Gala. Justin Harris Daniel bark. Hey, Tom Chee, Grant Sanderson, Rick Doblin Brett Victor and many others. My guest on this episode is my friend Daniel maakten. Berger an important node in the system. Now the odd thing about Daniel is that wherever he or I found ourselves riffing with others on topics existential, someone would often tell us about the other, and that we needed to become friends as well. And I think that was probably a pretty good call on their part. I have sat on this episode for months, however, because I was hoping that I would have a second chance to record with Daniel given that he was on very little sleep from the night before this discussion was recorded. However, we now find ourselves in a viral outbreak and Daniel is one of the few people I deal with trying to make progress on how humans can have a permanent future on the small and dangerous planet, particularly amidst the fatal temptations of nuclear and biological warfare, which I have termed the twin nuclei problem elsewhere. Now, the coronavirus may or may not turn out to be related to laboratory strains, but the problem problems at poses and foreshadows are directly within or adjacent to Daniel's area of focus. Daniel in particular favors the wisdom and design branch of the human fate decision tree, a branch that I think probably deserves the second most attention after my personal favorite, which is the need for new physics with the possibility of escape to the distant cosmos. That is, Daniel is searching for something like the wisdom needed to re engineer a non rival risk or anti rivalries society to live in harmony with its newfound godlike powers. Sometimes the search for a so called escape through wisdom goes into the name of game B. Now the idea behind game B is something like the following. Natural and sexual selection must be assumed to have engineered us for a cycle of competition and misery which we might term game a played read of tooth and claw under the law of the jungle. Game B is by contrast, a mythical second state where the agents are originally built within game a teach themselves to do something far less brutal rivalries unsustainable and wasteful, but without themselves getting out competed by those who wish to remain in game a, as such game be falls clearly within the confines of the so called human potential movement. While I have taken an interest in this counterculture, I am not myself a part of it is I fear that it does not fully make sense to me that game B is really a possibility. Nevertheless, the quest for a less rivalrous world is probably a noble one, and one of which I'm at least partially personally supportive. In any event, I thought that this is the episode that is probably most in keeping with the semi apocalyptic mood that many of us find ourselves within during these days of quarantine. I don't know if it will be everyone's cup of tea. But I think Daniel has many interesting perspectives. And it is a pleasure to introduce him to our portal community. So please sit back and relax as we bring you an uninterrupted discussion with Daniel smocked and burger Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today we'll be sitting down with the name that will not be familiar to many of you. My friend Daniel Schmachtenberger, Daniel, welcome to The Portal. | ||
Daniel Schmachtenberger 14:17 | Daniel Schmachtenberger 14:17 | ||
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Eric Weinstein 14:19 | Eric Weinstein 14:19 | ||
So, Daniel, I have to admit that the way in which I came to know you was a little bit odd, I would start to talk about various ideas and people would simply say to me, that's really interesting. Have you ever talked to Daniel | So, Daniel, I have to admit that the way in which I came to know you was a little bit odd, I would start to talk about various ideas and people would simply say to me, that's really interesting. Have you ever talked to Daniel schmuck burger? And so far as I knew you weren't affiliated with any famous institution, you did not have a large outreach into the public. And yet, somehow my network was very attuned to your thinking. Do you have any sense of what it was that caused your name among all names to come up? frequently in contexts that we share. | ||
Daniel Schmachtenberger 15:05 | Daniel Schmachtenberger 15:05 | ||
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Eric Weinstein 2:24:05 | Eric Weinstein 2:24:05 | ||
Well, look, I mean, there's there's different issues with women not realizing that most of their children will survive, which is happening in the demographic transition. So people miscalculated for a period of time leading to fears about runaway population booms. So that's that's one effect. And then there's another one about if you give people education. If you give, if you educate women, the opportunity costs of staying home and raising children starts to impress itself and some people will have fewer children. Yeah, but I think where you're where you're headed, is super interesting. And part maybe it's one of the reasons that people might find it rather disturbing. Making life awesome for females might mean having far fewer children. Yeah. All right. So that's a good thing in | Well, look, I mean, there's there's different issues with women not realizing that most of their children will survive, which is happening in the demographic transition. So people miscalculated for a period of time leading to fears about runaway population booms. So that's that's one effect. And then there's another one about if you give people education. If you give, if you educate women, the opportunity costs of staying home and raising children starts to impress itself and some people will have fewer children. Yeah, but I think where you're where you're headed, is super interesting. And part maybe it's one of the reasons that people might find it rather disturbing. Making life awesome for females might mean having far fewer children. Yeah. All right. So that's a good thing in shmotkin burgers. | ||
Daniel Schmachtenberger 2:24:59 | Daniel Schmachtenberger 2:24:59 | ||