ABOUT THE PROJECT | The Consilience Project

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. If you would like to be notified of new publications, please subscribe here.

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 non-profit think tank working to support the emergence of a mature global civilization, capable of wisely stewarding the unprecedented power of exponential technologies, in concert with an enduringly healthy biosphere—while avoiding the twin failure modes of catastrophe and dystopia.

Our Team

The Consilience Project is supported by a core team of passionate people from a wide range of disciplines.

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:

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.

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.

As a US 501c3 non-profit organization, our finances are reported transparently to the federal government and publicly available on the FCC website.

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.

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.

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:

  1. 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”.
  2. Anonymity allows our writers to be as truthful as possible without concern for professional, personal, or political repercussions or retribution.
  3. Anonymity insulates our writers from motives of individual ego by eliminating any incentive to alter content to maximize an article’s popularity.
  4. 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.

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

© 2024 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.

Critical conversations for the future of human civilization.

The Consilience Project publishes novel research at the leading edges of global risk mitigation, governance design and culture. Our content explores the key challenges and existential threats facing humanity, and the underlying problems with current approaches for addressing them. We outline how our social systems and institutions need to be redesigned if free, open, non-authoritarian societies are to survive.

Our Context

At no other point in history has humanity faced such a wide range of novel catastrophic risks. Our civilization has never been more vast, complicated, and fragile. This systemic fragility is exacerbated by new technologies, geopolitical instability, an ecological crisis and a reliance on global economic supply chains. These interlocking, interrelated problems are known collectively as the metacrisis. The Consilience Project’s primary aim is to clarify and reveal the nature of the metacrisis to enable comprehensive solutions to global problems. Our work recognizes the interconnectedness of humanity’s challenges: any solution must factor the underlying drivers of each one.

Project Initiative

Our Project

We publish research and analysis to help guide decision-makers and leaders towards the critical paths necessary to address the unique challenges of our time. The content published here is for any individual, group or institution trying to innovate around global coordination challenges, catastrophic risks and social technologies.solution must factor the underlying drivers of each one.

Project Partners

Our Team

The Consilience Project consists of a core team of passionate people from a wide range of disciplines.

Adrian Hindes

Strategic Research
Earth Systems Science, Complex Adaptive Systems, Philosophy, and Transdisciplinary Synthesis.

Tali Edid

Executive Office
Project management, strategy, research.

Leah Elliott Hamilton

Editorial Support
Teacher, poet, founder at Bright Dawn Media.

Andrea Owe

Research & Editorial
Catastrophic risk, environmental philosophy, AI ethics, art.

Jake Matatyaou PhD

Strategic Research
Politics, philosophy, technology.
Former designer, architect, philosophy educator.

Eugenio Battaglia

Product Engineering
Web3 Researcher at curvelabs.eu, Director at meaning.systems

Lucian Tarnowski

Collaboration & Coordination
Executive Director of Civana, Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum.

Kyle Gresham PhD

Materials Science
Ret. Colonel, Director of US Air Force Research, nanotech, bioweapons containment.

Jamie Daves

Media Strategy
Founder Current TV, Entrepreneur, Venture Capitalist, Investor.

Jordan Hall JD

Strategic Intelligence
Founder at DivX, Founder of Game B,trustee, Santa Fe Institute.

Alex Morrise PhD

Machine Learning
Theoretical physics, string theory, machine learning, data science, deep learning, adaptive learning.

Christopher Eddy

Philosophy & Social Theory
Governance, catastrophic risk, humane tech, cognitive science, logic, metaphysics

Matt Ellison

Diplomacy & International Security
Hoover Institution, Stanford. Associate Editor, Palladium. Advisor, Bismarck Analysis.

Alex Randall PhD

Editorial & Policy
Public policy, defence & security, neuroscience, art. Former UK Government, Cambridge Fellow.

Aneel Chima PhD

Clinical Psychology & Human Systems
Director of Health and Human Performance at Stanford’s Flourishing Project, Co-founder of At The Core.

Yasmine El Baggari

Economic and International Intelligence
Founder and CEO at Voyaj, US State Department “Engage America” Ambassador, and Researcher at Harvard University; Blogger and speaker at international conferences.

John Perkins

Economic Intelligence
Author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man; Former Advisor to the World Bank, United Nations, U.S. Treasury Department. Founding member of The Pachamama Alliance; Activist and lecturer.

Arthur Brock

Economics & Systems
Co-founder of Holochain, Software Architect, decentralized social and technological systems.

Mihaela Ulieru PhD

Intelligent Systems & Organic Governance
Founder of the International Industrial Informatics, President of IMPACT Institute for the Digital Economy, Technology Alchemist Innovating at the nexus of AI/IoT/Blockchain.

Alexander Bard

Philosophy
Co-Author of Futurica Trilogy, Music Producer, Co-founder of Stockholm Record.

Jonathan Rowson PhD

Philosophy and Strategy
Co-founder and Director at Perspectiva, Chess Grandmaster, 1999.  Author.

Bill Melton

Technology and Economics
Founder and CEO of CyberCash. Founder of VeriFone, Inc. Former Board Member of the Santa Fe Institute.

Scott Barry Kaufman PhD

Social Psychology
Cognitive Psychologist, Professor at Columbia University, author, Former Scientific Director at The Imagination Institute.

Rob Goldman

Social Media
Former VP of Advertising at Facebook.

John Vervaeke PhD

Cognitive Psychology and Science
Professor of cognitive psychology and science at the University of Toronto.

Isaac Lee

Media
Former Chief Content Officer of Univision and Televisa.

Marc Collins Chen

Future of Cities
Founder, Board Member, and former CEO of Oceanix: Sustainable Floating Cities. Former Minister of Tourism for French Polynesia.

David Fuller

Journalism & Media
Channel 4 News (UK), BBC Newsnight, Guardian, Buzzfeed. Founder, Rebel Wisdom.

Eric Mathur PhD

Biosciences
Senior scientist at the Human Genome Project; leader in molecular biology.

Bill Twist

Environmental Law
Co-Founder of Pachamama, Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature.

Jenny Stefanotti

Design thinking
Founder, Dent. Public policy, philanthropy, design, technology, behavioral economics, design methodology, and venture capital.

Greg Thomas

Cultural Intelligence
CEO Jazz Leadership Project, Senior Fellow at Institute for Cultural Evolution, author, educator.

Kunal Sood

Impact Entrepreneur
XFellow, CEO of #WeThePlanet, impact entrepreneur, disruptive innovator & curator.

Phoebe Tickell

Decentralization & Democratic Practice
Decentralization, distributed governance, horizontal practices. Collaborative and transparent decision-making and financing.

Andrew Huberman PhD

Neuroscience
Tenured Professor of Neurology at Stanford Medical School; brain dev., brain plasticity, and neural regeneration.

Jeffrey Ladish

Security Research
Cybersecurity and biosecurity; Existential risk expert.

Michel Bauwens

Peer-to-Peer Social Dynamics & Technology
Founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, and the Peer-to-Peer Cooperative.

Peter Demitry MD

Research & Strategy
Ret. Colonel, Associate Surgeon General of the US Air Force, fighter pilot. Director of NFIM.

Jamie Wheal

Cultural Architecture
Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project and Co-Author of the Global Bestseller Stealing Fire.

Molly Maloof MD

Medicine & Biosciences
Integrative physician and medical researcher in the areas of longevity and human potential.

John Robb

Military Intelligence
Air Force, Special Ops, Military Intelligence. Expertise in counterterrorism and unconventional warfare.

Michael Slaby

Digital Strategy
CTO & CIO Obama campaign. Chief strategist, Harmony Labs. Technology, politics, and impact strategies.

Alex Gladstein

Open Societies
Chief Strategy Officer at Human Rights Foundation. Faculty at Singularity University. Advisor at Blockchain Capital.

Nora Bateson

Complex Systems
Director of research at the Bateson Institute, transcontextual research, in ecology, economy, social change, health, education, and art.

Tyson Yunkaporta PhD

Cultural Research
Lecturer and Author on Indigenous Knowledge, academic, researcher, educator, art critic.

Raj Vaswani

Technology & Data
Innovation, product development, and product management. Data science, IoT, global utilities, information technology.

Tomas Bjorkman

Financial Intelligence
Founder, Investment Banking Partners AB, Chairman, EFG Investment Bank. Member, Club of Rome.

Justin Rosenstein

Technology and Governance
Co-founder of Asana, programmer of software, organizations, cultures, & systems in service of love. Co-Founder, One Project.

John Mattison MD

Medical Strategy
Former Chief Medical Information Officer and Associate CMO at Kaiser Permanente.

Fernanda Ibarra

Collective Intelligence
Economics, currency design, organizational architecture, regenerative culture.

Adam Robinson

Market Intelligence
President at Robinson Global Strategies, Founder at Princeton Review, Chess Master, Top Financial Advisor.

Jim Rutt

Complexity and Technology
Chairman, Santa Fe Institute. Former CEO of Network solutions. Complexity science, politics, economics.

Evelyn Gosnell

Behavioral Economics
Applies behavioral economics insights in product design, with a focus on technology.

Nate Hagens PhD

Natural Resource Economics and Risk
Focuses on the interrelationship between debt-based financial markets and natural resources.

Liv Boeree

Game Theory & Existential Risk
Science Broadcaster, Astrophysics, game theory, existential risk.

Dan Shalmon PhD

National Security Policy
Research experience employing qualitative and quantitative methods for clients in national security, education and public policy.

Sanjiv Sidhu

Business & Supply Chain Intelligence
Cofounder and Chair of 09 Solutions. Supply chain management, artificial intelligence.

Peter Sforza

Geospatial Intelligence Analyst
Director, Center for Geospatial Information Technology. Complex systems, resilience, regenerative systems.

R.P. Eddy

Intelligence & National Security
CEO of Ergo, Fmr Director at the White House National Security Council, Senior Diplomat. Economics, natl. security and geo-politics. Investor. Best selling author.

Tristan Harris

Technology Ethics
Co-Founder at the Center for Humane Technology. Technology ethicist, philosopher, systems thinker.

Deepa Purushothaman

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Author, speaker, and researcher on systemic racism and the advancement of women of color in corporate America.

Ryan Walsh

Directed product strategy across Apple Media Divisions.

Gilbert Morris

Professor, Financial Centre Expert, Economist, Diplomat, Historian, Author.

Rob Schuham

Co-Founder of Undercurrent, COMMON, and Fearless; former Chief Digital Advisor, Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project.

Paul Hughes

Branding, Design, Innovation
Strategic Director, Adaptive Cultures design strategy firm.

Bob Gray

Visual Design & Brand
Founder of Red & Grey design and brand agency. Partner at Adaptive cultures design strategy firm.

Julia Pope

Strategic communications & Partnerships
Outreach and campaign specialist, Founder of Hylo, former CBC Radio journalist.

Sammi Fischer

Executive Administrator
Scheduling, administration, and back office.

Mia Grable

Operations
Project management, software, finance, operations.

Ben Landau-Taylor

Economic Intelligence
Senior Researcher at Bismarck Analysis, focus on industrial economics.

Daniel Schmachtenberger

Project Strategy
Social philosophy, collective intelligence, risk mitigation.

Jess Webb

Social Network Intelligence, Founder, Aizle Analytics, Former All Source Intelligence, JSOC, NSWDG.

Zak Stein EdD

Editorial & Strategy
Psychometrics & Education Expert in psychology and philosophy, previous Co-Founder at Lectica Inc.

Samo Burja

Geopolitical Intelligence Founder, Bismarck Analysis, Research Fellow, Long Now Foundation.

Joseph Romero

Culture, News & Journalism Editor-in-chief of Culturekiosque, journalist for Le Monde & Wall Street Journal Europe.

Rachel Howard PhD

Biological Research Microbiology, interdisciplinary biosciences, epistemics.

Advisor and Team Disclaimer

Aligned with the principle of Consilience and the mission of this project, we seek earnest and well-considered perspectives on topics from all sides of an issue and through the lens of different disciplines. Our advisors all support the project’s central aim of better public education and dialogue: that does not mean they

Partner Organizations



Helena is a problem-solving institution that addresses urgent global issues through non-profit, for-profit, and legislative projects.



Bismarck is a firm that analyzes institutions, from governments to companies, focusing on the causes of societal decay and flourishing.

Project Commitments

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:

Politicians, journalists, and everyday people on all sides intentionally mislead with facts, mischaracterize opposing views, and dehumanize those with whom they disagree. Social media has started to change our basic habits of communication by amplifying and incentivizing bad faith tactics.

Politicians, journalists, and everyday people on all sides intentionally mislead with facts, mischaracterize opposing views, and dehumanize those with whom they disagree. Social media has started to change our basic habits of communication by amplifying and incentivizing bad faith tactics.

Project Transparency

Our Financials

We will be filing and publishing our 2020 990 form in November of 2021 on our website and GuideStar. You can view our federal extension application here.

Our Legal Position

© 2021 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.