About the Project
Critical Conversations for Making Sense of the World.
The Consilience Project is a publication of the Civilization Research Institute. Although The Consilience Project is no longer releasing new articles at a regular cadence, it will continue to publish related content at varying intervals.
Our Project
The Consilience Project was founded in order to explore and address some of the profound challenges facing public sensemaking at a time of rapid technological change. Its original set of publications aimed to describe the state of our information commons and uncover the roots of the challenges facing open societies. While the topic of public sensemaking remains at the core of the Project’s focus, future publications will also touch upon adjacent fields with an impact on people’s ability to think critically and holistically about the state of the world, such as politics, warfare, vested economic interests, and advanced technologies.
The Consilience lens is about bringing together multiple perspectives, so that a clearer understanding may emerge from the synergies between different viewpoints. The articles here aim to provide a set of frames for making sense of our world system, and as such they may also analyze consequential global topics that need to be understood more broadly if humanity is to succeed in engaging with our challenges in any meaningful way.
Our Context
The ability to understand and interpret the world accurately is a necessary prerequisite for addressing the profound issues humanity faces today. Yet in our global civilization, and in the presence of increasingly powerful digital technologies, it is becoming ever more difficult to make sense of the world. As our ability to discern what is true or false declines, it is harder to determine what truly matters in the context of global events, affecting our ability to make informed decisions. At the same time, the consequences of our choices grow in significance as technological development accelerates.
Our civilization has never been more vast, complicated, obligate, and fragile. This systemic fragility is exacerbated by technological change, geopolitical instability, an ecological crisis, and a reliance on global economic supply chains (among other factors). These interconnected problems—and the common underlying dynamics that give rise to them—are known collectively as the metacrisis. The concept of the metacrisis may be seen as a unified theory for making sense of the world as it is now.
The Civilization Research Institute
The Civilization Research Institute (CRI) is a 501©3 nonprofit research organization focused on preventing civilizational risks and improving social coordination. The aim is to support stability and genuine progress.
Our Team
The Consilience Project is supported by a core team of passionate people from a wide range of disciplines.
Team
Daniel Schmachtenberger
Project Strategy
Social philosophy, collective intelligence, risk mitigation.
Zak Stein EdD
Editorial & Strategy
Psychometrics & Education Expert in psychology and philosophy, previous Co-Founder at Lectica Inc.
Alex Randall PhD
Editorial & Policy
Public policy, defence & security, neuroscience, art. Former UK Government, Cambridge Fellow.
Bob Gray
Visual Design & Brand
Founder of Red & Grey design and brand agency. Partner at Adaptive cultures design strategy firm.
Paul Hughes
Branding, Design, Innovation
Strategic Director, Adaptive Cultures design strategy firm.
Mia Grable
Operations
Project management, software, finance, operations.
Jake Matatyaou PhD
Strategic Research
Politics, philosophy, technology.
Former designer, architect, philosophy educator.
Tali Edid
Executive Office
Project management, strategy, research.
Christopher Eddy
Philosophy & Social Theory
Governance, catastrophic risk, humane tech, cognitive science, logic, metaphysics
Andrea Owe
Research & Editorial
Catastrophic risk, environmental philosophy, AI ethics, art.
Adrian Hindes
Strategic Research
Earth Systems Science, Complex Adaptive Systems, Philosophy, and Transdisciplinary Synthesis.
Sammi Fischer
Executive Administrator
Scheduling, administration, and back office.
Leah Elliott Hamilton
Editorial Support
Teacher, poet, founder at Bright Dawn Media.
Contributors
Samo Burja
Geopolitical Intelligence Founder, Bismarck Analysis, Research Fellow, Long Now Foundation.
Ben Landau-Taylor
Economic Intelligence
Senior Researcher at Bismarck Analysis, focus on industrial economics.
Jess Webb
Social Network Intelligence, Founder, Aizle Analytics, Former All Source Intelligence, JSOC, NSWDG.
Julia Pope
Strategic communications & Partnerships
Outreach and campaign specialist, Founder of Hylo, former CBC Radio journalist.
Team Disclaimer
Aligned with the principle of Consilience and the Civilization Research Institute’s broader purpose, we seek earnest and well-considered perspectives on topics from all sides of an issue and through the lens of different disciplines.
While everyone on the team contributes to the project and is aligned with the mission as a whole, that does not mean each piece represents the view of each team member, nor that the personal posts of team members elsewhere online represent the views of the project.
The views expressed in the articles are those of the Civilization Research Institute as an organization, which assumes full responsibility for the content.
Our Ethical Committments
In an effort to address the erosion of trust in the media and guard against the biasing forces that arise from perverse incentives and human fallibility, we have implemented the following commitments:
Open access to all content
Universal access to information is foundational to a functioning open society. For the duration of this project, none of our content will ever be behind a paywall.
Freedom from Competing Incentives
This is a purely donation-supported endeavor, with no competing agendas beyond the stated mission. Neither the content nor its host site will serve as an income stream for the project in any way. To eliminate the possibility of manipulation or preference modification of our content, we will never sell our readers’ data or display paid advertisements of any kind.
Transparency of Financial Sources
As a US 501c3 non-profit organization, our finances are reported transparently to the federal government and publicly available on the FCC website.
Freedom from Donor Influence
To protect our content from influence, we will not accept funds from any person or organization that seeks to influence content through their support. Moreover, we will consider any actor that even suggests a conditionalized donation as a potential source of harm to the information commons and investigate accordingly.
Commitment to Quality over Quantity
Our commitments regarding freedom from financial influence present real limitations to our ability to fund the team. If we are limited in what we can raise with these commitments in place, then we will simply be smaller and do less with full integrity. We will not rationalize compromise for scale.
Collective Attribution of Authorship
We will attribute all articles to the collective authorship of the House. This serves both our readers and our writers in a variety of ways:
- The anonymity of authorship means readers are engaging with the content itself rather than the personality of its author, circumventing writer preference or mistrust on the basis of perceived content “ownership”.
- Anonymity allows our writers to be as truthful as possible without concern for professional, personal, or political repercussions or retribution.
- Anonymity insulates our writers from motives of individual ego by eliminating any incentive to alter content to maximize an article’s popularity.
- Anonymity encourages the entire research and writing team to support all work rather than having preferential focus on pieces for which they are lead author.
Authentic Diversity of Viewpoints and Backgrounds
We will continue to seek out team members and advisors from across the spectrum of political perspectives, industries, epistemic disciplines, as well as cultures and regions of the world. This multiplicity of viewpoints provides a more complete picture of any given issue. It also serves as a mitigating factor against our own human susceptibility to bias and group reinforcement.
Our Financials
We will file and publish our annual 990 forms on our website and GuideStar.
Our Legal Position
© 2026 by the Civilization Research Initiative The Civilization Research Initiative owns all copyrights to the work of The Consilience Project.
The articles on this web site may be redistributed in other media and non-commercial publications as long as the following conditions are met. The redistributed article may not be abridged, edited or altered in any way without the express consent of The Consilience Project. The redistributed article may not be sold for a profit or included in another media or publication that is sold for a profit without the express consent of The Consilience Project.