From: jimruttshow8596
Sensemaking is fundamentally important as it forms the basis for collective choice making and effective communication in addressing global challenges [02:00:00]. Many global issues, such as environmental problems, war pathways, or infrastructure issues, are essentially coordination problems among humans [01:35:00] [01:42:00]. Solving these requires humanity to coordinate differently, which depends on high-quality collective sensemaking [01:57:00] [02:02:00].
Current State of Sensemaking: “Peak Bad Sensemaking”
Currently, the world is experiencing “peak bad sensemaking” [03:09:00]. On almost every major issue, people either lack understanding of what is true or hold fervent, totally opposite beliefs, leading to deep polarization [03:11:00] [03:18:00]. Examples include debates during the COVID-19 pandemic (masks, hydroxychloroquine, lockdowns), discussions on systemic racism, and U.S.-China relations [03:23:23]. This lack of shared, coherent understanding prevents problem-solving and fuels civil breakdown [04:03:00] [04:11:00].
Challenges to Collective Sensemaking
Scale and Complexity of Problems
The world is now globally coupled at high density, a development that has only become truly significant since the 1980s [04:42:00]. This global interconnectedness, coupled with humanity potentially exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity, has made the planet itself a global player [05:09:00] [05:15:00]. Problems like climate change, wealth inequality, or pandemic spread are of high complexity and dimensionality, making them largely unresolvable by formal analytical methods alone [05:32:00] [06:02:00]. These “hyper objects” (e.g., climate change, world hunger, AI risk) are not directly apprehendable by human senses, requiring conceptual understanding that lacks a visceral, felt experience [49:53:00] [50:55:00].
The Evolved Communications Ecosystem
The current communications ecosystem is an emergent, undesigned platform that has radically transformed sensemaking [06:37:00] [07:41:00]. Unlike the era of three TV networks where most Americans shared a common news baseline [06:47:00] [07:00:00], today’s internet offers a cacophony of voices, leading to a lack of shared reality [07:02:00] [11:10:00].
- Advertising-Driven Algorithms: A phase change around 2004-2005 allowed online services to be fully funded by advertising, shifting the business model from quickly providing value to maximizing “time on site” [18:14:00] [18:39:00].
- Dopamine Hijacking and Hypernormal Stimuli: Social media algorithms, more powerful than chess-playing AIs, optimize content curation for individual users (“n=1 optimization”) to maximize engagement [12:43:00] [14:56:00] [25:52:00]. This is achieved by appealing to emotional triggers and cognitive biases, leading to “dopamine hijacking” through “hypernormal stimuli” [14:23:00] [20:08:00] [24:11:00]. As with fast food or pornography, these platforms extract the dopaminergic reward from beneficial evolutionary contexts, leading to addiction and potential “dopamine exhaustion” and despair [23:34:00] [24:41:00] [20:26:00]. A high level of addiction can be seen as an inverse measure of a healthy civilization [26:35:00].
- Bad Faith Discourse and Information Pollution: The information environment is polluted by both intentional bad faith discourse (sharing known falsehoods) and unintentional misinformation (sharing incorrect beliefs) [37:01:00] [37:20:00]. These affordances of the platforms, originally for mundane advertising, are exploited by state and non-state actors for narrative and info warfare, making it easy to exacerbate existing divisions [16:36:00] [17:04:00] [21:10:00].
Erosion of Authority and Rise of Tribalism
The current information environment has led to the fragmentation and destruction of consensus around authority, without replacing it with anything [27:12:00] [27:56:00]. While gatekeepers in previous eras (like Walter Cronkite) kept obvious nonsense out of public circulation [12:29:00], modern platforms allow “virulent forms of being wrong” like anti-vaxxer movements or QAnon to spread widely [11:43:00] [12:03:00].
When overwhelmed by this complex and incentivized information environment, people often default to tribalism, aligning with “Team Blue” or “Team Red” [12:45:00] [13:00:00]. This leads to a dominant logical fallacy: confirmation bias, where every new piece of information is filtered through a tribal take rather than objective assessment [13:34:00]. This tribal warfare prevents participatory governance because people cannot imagine how those with opposing views could be anything but “stupid or bad” [17:50:00] [18:01:00].
Historical Perspective on Sensemaking and Governance
Historically, successful democracies emerged following cultural enlightenments that fostered specific qualities in citizens [39:33:00].
- Athenian Democracy: Emerged from the Greek enlightenment, valuing education, formal logic, rhetoric, history, emotional regulation (Stoicism), and the Socratic method of debate and perspective-taking [39:40:00].
- American Republic: Followed the post-European Renaissance enlightenment, emphasizing “Renaissance people” with empirical capacity (scientific method) and the Hegelian dialectic (seeking thesis, antithesis, and synthesis for higher-order reconciliation) [40:54:00] [41:17:00].
Founding fathers like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin stressed the importance of universal public education in “the science of government” and an independent “fourth estate” (news) as prerequisites for democracy [42:00:00] [42:06:00]. Without these, a republic or democracy devolves into an autocracy or kleptocracy as citizens cease to engage in governance and institutions become captured by economic and political interests [43:11:00] [44:27:00].
Pathways Forward: Solutions and Interventions
Effective collective sensemaking and decision making needs to address both the individual and institutional levels.
Individual Practices
- Commitment to Reality and Dubiousness of Models: Cultivate a “sacred oath” to a direct relationship with reality, acknowledging that all models are imperfect [20:25:00] [20:50:00]. Be dubious of over-devotion to any single model [21:26:00].
- Bias Checking: Be dubious of strong emotional reactions (outrage, certainty, repulsion towards out-groups, identity with in-groups) and consciously check for emotional or cognitive hijacking [21:40:00] [21:55:00].
- Seeking Dissenting Views: Actively seek out earnest, good-faith dissenting views, especially from those who know the most about a topic [23:01:00] [23:11:00].
- Media Curation: Remove social media apps from phones to reduce constant micro-targeting. Curate personal feeds intentionally, following diverse perspectives (far left, far right, international) to gain a parallax view and understand differing viewpoints [24:01:00] [24:10:00].
- Think Before Sharing: Before sharing content, ask three times: “Is this actually good for the world to share this?” [25:07:00].
Institutional/Project-Based Approaches
- Facilitating Dialectic Conversations: Host conversations (not debates) among earnest, diverse thinkers on consequential and debated topics. These conversations should aim to identify what is known, unknown, and areas of differing weighting, with a skilled facilitator [27:50:00] [28:27:00].
- Meta-News and Narrative Assessment: For highly polarized topics, conduct assessments of the narrative landscape, steel-man each primary narrative to promote understanding, and then analytically break down narratives into propositions. Evaluate evidence, identify falsifiable claims, and distinguish conjecture from verifiable information [30:21:00] [30:45:00] [31:17:00]. This process aims to diffuse conflict by showing the partial signals and noise in all positions [32:00:00].
- Transparency and Epistemic Capacity Building: Make the sense-making process transparent, showing the data factored and epistemic models used, so individuals can learn and apply these models themselves [33:43:00] [34:26:00]. This acts as an “optimized public education” for civic engagement [34:28:00].
- Developing a “Memetic Immune System”: Help people recognize and become inoculated against “narrative and info weapons,” such as “russell conjugation” (loaded language), “lakoff framing,” and statistical cherry-picking, across the entire political spectrum [01:06:42] [01:07:16] [01:22:31].
Rethinking Governance Models
Given the unprecedented scale and complexity of modern problems, individual sensemaking, no matter how smart, is often inadequate [45:08:00]. While upgrading education and thinking tools is crucial, new institutional structures may also be needed [46:46:00] [46:56:00].
One proposed model is liquid democracy, where individuals can proxy their votes to trusted experts aligned on values, with the flexibility to change proxies or reclaim votes for specific issues [47:09:00]. This could concentrate decision-making power towards more informed individuals while maintaining democratic principles [47:35:00].
The challenge lies in creating systems of coordination that produce higher-quality results through the engagement of the many, rather than the control of the few, by truly harvesting collective intelligence [01:06:15]. This requires not just cognitive enlightenment but also a cultural shift towards respectful engagement and seeking shared understanding [01:10:54].
Ultimately, addressing the current state of sensemaking requires a renewed cultural enlightenment that fosters individual epistemic capacity, emotional and cognitive immunity, and a commitment to high-quality intersubjective dialogue, allowing for the emergence of genuine collective intelligence [01:07:58].