I want to introduce you to an exciting new project initiated by the Civilization Research Institute – the Consilience Project – co-founded by Daniel Schmachtenberger.
If you are not familiar with Daniel’s work, take a look at this video series on the War on Sensemaking.
I have put together below a short description of the Consilience Project adapted from their Executive Summary of the project.
You will find more information in their project slide deck, and there is a Facebook group for people who want to know what is needed and provide support.
The world faces unprecedented catastrophic risks across the spectrum of finance, governments, ecological health, and global stability. To respond appropriately, leaders and citizens need increased capacities to make sense of what is happening in the world and to communicate and coordinate effectively.
The Consilience Project aims to catalyze a cultural movement toward better sense-making and dialogue – the essential foundations of a functional democratic society.
The goal is to restore the health of our information commons by helping educate people on how to improve their information processing so they can better detect media bias and disinformation while becoming more capable sense-makers and citizens.
The benefit to society is to decrease polarization and tribalism, decrease outraged certainty on all sides, and increase the quality of public sense-making and good faith civil discourse towards a civilization that can actually coordinate effectively and solve problems.
The benefit to individuals is resilience to media manipulation, increased capacity to understand the world, including the views of other people, access to a community of earnest and capable thinkers seeking to make sense of critical topics together. All of these serve to increase personal agency and the capacity to participate in improving the world meaningfully.
Consilience Definition: “In science and history, consilience is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own.”
Credit: Adapted from: The Consilience Project – Executive Summary
Update (17 May 2021): The Consilience Project website is now open.
Tweet: The Consilience Project
Knowledge Letter: Issue: 247 (Subscribe)
Tags: consilience (3) | Daniel Schmachtenberger (20) | global information ecosystem (10) | information commons (3) | sense-making (41)
RSS: Blog Feed
Photo Credits: Midjourney (Public Domain)