About

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.

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.

The Consilience Project is a publication of the Civilization Research Institute (CRI), a charitable think tank focused on reducing systemic fragility and advancing new forms of governance and coordination. CRI seeks to inform the next era of human collaboration and collective intelligence to ensure human and ecological thriving.

Who We Are

The Consilience Project consists of a core team of passionate people from a wide range of disciplines. Meet our team and growing advisory network here.

Our Ethical Commitments

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.
With the exception of possible occasional guest posts by specific individuals, 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.
In our “Under the Hood” sections, we will show the evidence and methods of analysis we used to arrive at our conclusions. Rather than guarding our methods like trade secrets in a competitive environment, we will open-source all of our resources and processes in the hope that others will replicate, adapt and improve upon our methods of sensemaking and reporting.

The Financial Stuff

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.


The Legal Stuff

© 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. The articles on this web site may be included in a commercial publication or other media only if prior consent for republication is received from the Consilience Project.