A weekend exploring civilisational sanity

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A weekend exploring Civilisational Sanity (Mittelhof, Germany, Dec 12-15, €100)

I came across this event. It made me thing of Edgeryders – both in the topic areas, and in giving me the vibe of “I don’t quite understand what’s going on here, but I’m intrigued”:

We use the term civilisational sanity here to refer to human-friendly societal designs. That might include physical structures, shared narratives and values, norms, customs, laws and other mechanisms supporting cooperation and high-quality decision-making that enable human (and non-human) flourishing. A sane society is one in which humans are happy to partake.

The three central themes that we’ll be exploring during the event are:

  1. How can we analyse the civilisational sanity of structures we’re embedded in?
  2. How do social structures develop sanity and stay sane? How can we influence that? What guardrails can protect from corrosive effects?
  3. Sometimes, increasing the sanity of a structure is not feasible. Is it possible to behave in ways that can partially insulate you from the damage and mitigate the negative effects on your own well-being and epistemics?

I don’t know the organizers; they seem to fit somewhere in the bubble of effective altruism, less wrong, rationalism and post-rationalism. In any case, these are evergreen topics, and it’s always fascinating to see how different subcultures tackle them. I’m contemplating going along.

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@danohu what a pleasure to read you again!

Questions 2 and 3 of the Civilizational Sanity event are interesting (question 1 is rather obvious, given the definition they give). I am a bit wary of the Less Wrong crowd, because I associate Yudkowski with an idea of rationality as optimization for individual payoffs, which is much too close to that of neoclassical economics for comfort, and indeed effective altruism is the utility theory of neoclassical econ taken to its ultimate consequences. But OK, like you say these are interesting topics. I don’t think I’ll be going, but would be curious to hear your opinion when you are back.

Where are you based these days?