Fix Sensemaking

Every empire breaks down. Right now we have a fully globalized system and it's in the process of breakdown, where all of the previous systems did break down but they were localized. This one will not continue to actually be able to help influence the rest of the world in a positive direction. It just won't. It is in kind of a decay process. The question is whether it decays into, uh, just less and less function and irrelevance, or whether it decays and reboots. And in order to do I think that a cultural enlightenment as a prerequisite is necessary. Is everyone recognizing that collective choice-making has to be based on collective sense-making? And are we starting to really invest not in doubling down on our own bias, but in the capacity to make sense of things well, the capacity to understand why other people are thinking the things that they do, and the capacity to communicate well so we can coordinate? How to fix collective sensemaking is a big, hard topic, and I absolutely can't say that myself or the groups that I work with or anyone I know has the whole thing figured out. It's why I want more people to understand both how much it affects all the other problems that you care about and how it's upstream to those, and some of the factors contributing to it so that more collective intelligence starts working on various aspects of the solution. When we think of the commons, we think about some shared aspect of the world that is both a resource that we have shared access to, but also some shared stewardship of. Well, the information commons is what is the space of information out there about what is true that informs our capacity to make choices? And we can see that just like a smokestack billowing pollution into the air, most of what is being put into the information commons is pollution.