The Consilience Project

Executive Summary

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."  ~Thomas Jefferson

Overview

The Consilience Project is a non-profit media organization that aims to help catalyze a cultural movement toward higher quality sensemaking, public dialogue, and civic virtue — the essential foundations for a functional democratic society.

Our goal is to restore the health of our information commons by helping people improve their media and political literacy and general sensemaking skills so they can better detect bias and disinformation where they occur, and more clearly assess base reality, understand other people’s views, and orient towards effective communication and cooperation.

To accomplish this, we’re building a novel type of educational news resource that covers what is happening in the world, how the media landscape is covering what is happening (particularly addressing distortions), with the central focus being to help develop people’s capacities to make sense of complex issues by highlighting our processes for doing so. In addition to the content we create, the intent is for this to become home to a generative community that we will grow through structured forums, facilitated dialogues, partnerships, and innovation prizes.

The aim is to change the trajectory of the public sphere from the radical descent of recent decades to an ascent towards a culture capable of participatory governance.

Our context

The world is facing unprecedented catastrophic risks arising from the intersection of exponential technologies, planetary boundaries, economic and supply chain fragility, and geopolitical instability. In order 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 towards adequate solutions.

Rather than providing the kind of information that equips people to understand the world and become capable of meaningful participation, our current media environment largely drives polarization, misinformation, and outrage, debasing the capacity for generative civic engagement and participatory governance.

The founders of the United States understood that a functional democracy requires both a healthy independent media and robust public education. Currently, we have neither. As a result, both democratic institutions and civil society are breaking down.

How we got here

In the last 20 years, the internet and social media have radically transformed and fragmented the media landscape. With the decline of subscription-based news and investigative journalism, along with local news, the rise of consolidated media companies aligned with partisan aims, and the development of social media’s algorithmically driven filter-bubbles that reinforce bias and tribalism, the ideas of “trusted authorities” and shared truth have largely collapsed.

In this new environment, information and narrative warfare have become cheap and easy ways to influence large populations. As state and non-state actors wage information and narrative warfare on civilian populations, citizens themselves increasingly become the weapons, warriors, and contested territory of the great power game.

In this polluted and unreliable media ecosystem, with no shared sense of reality, overwhelmed by too much unparsable information, our ability to make sense of the world has broken — at an incredible cost.

The Consilience Project

The Consilience Project combines a novel approach to creating essential public information (news and educational resources) with wider movement building through curation, innovation prizes, and partnerships.

Our content strategy has three primary pillars:

1. A novel form of News aimed at providing useful situational awareness and insight on consequential and conflicted topics, as clearly as possible, with a rigorous process for accuracy and bias correction, as well as an explicit emphasis on the epistemic tools being employed;
2. MetaNews, or sense-making about what’s happening in the media landscape itself, particularly where there are highly polarized narratives trending in consequential ways;
3. Education in media literacy, civics, and critical sense-making skills so people become better equipped to notice and be more resilient to misinformation, propaganda, and biased narratives, and more capable of making sense of important and complex topics.

Our movement catalyzing strategy involves:

1. Innovation prizes for well-designed projects addressing any aspect of improving public sense-making and dialogue: improving incentives in journalism, countering social media algorithm bias, better public education in civics, improving academic science and peer review, countering narrative and information warfare, etc. The aim is to facilitate traction for many projects that can collectively support the cultural renaissance needed.
2. Sense-making forums where experts and people with deep knowledge are engaged in good faith processes to generate shared understanding and insight on important topics.
3. Curated resources of the best publicly available research tools, data sets, news sources, fact and bias checking sites, and educational resources.

Our Aim

The societal benefit we are designing this for is to decrease polarization and tribalism, decrease outraged certainty on all sides, and increase the quality of public sense-making and good faith discourse, towards a society that can actually coordinate effectively and solve problems.

The benefit for individuals is better resilience to media manipulation, increased capacity to understand the world, including the views of other people, and 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 meaningfully participate in shaping the trajectory of the future.

Project status

We have assembled a core team including senior intelligence analysts, researchers, educators, and media professionals, and are launching an initial beta site in Q1 of 2021.

The project is purely non-profit funded — we won’t allow ads, put our information behind paywalls, or sell people’s data. We also won’t accept donations that seek to influence the nature of the content in any way. We believe that the information commons needed for an effective open society needs to be incorruptible and supported as a public good. This project is designed towards that end.

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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.”