Humanity is living through an unprecedented confluence of emerging, accelerating, and compounding crises - threatening perhaps even extinction. Yet we are also equipped with bold and proven means to confront them.
The risks are great but the rewards of redressing them are equally vast. In averting existential risks, we can also fundamentally transform our social, institutional, and conceptual inheritance for the better.
As much as this calls for boldness, it also requires focus. Ours is set on the following:
Developing Wise Institutions
The Odyssean Institute empowers people and institutions to better navigate complex problems during times of crisis. Our solution, the Odyssean Process, blends expert knowledge, computational foresight and participatory decision making. This novel combination deepens existing institutional capacity, harnessing collective intelligence to address global risks - in a legitimate and effective manner.
To avoid sleepwalking into catastrophe and instead chart hopeful and flourishing futures, our work addresses the neglected need for new incentives and structures to collectively decide better, together.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Palaeolithic emotions, mediaeval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
E.O. Wilson
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
T.S Eliot
Anticipating Global Resilience
Deferring resilience until solutions and mitigations have been exhausted is not viable. The Odyssean Institute connects disciplines, countries, and sectors through initiatives like GRAIN to identify and reinforce critical nodes in global systems where adaptation and resilience are most needed – not only to survive systemic shocks, but to bounce back from them stronger.
Resilience and adaptation measures must not be burdens that only kick in during crises, but endeavours that develop and refine systems’ robustness to the benefit of all parties, even under stable conditions.
Nurturing Flourishing & Wellbeing
The Odyssean Institute seeks to foster human flourishing, beyond mere survival. For that, we must rethink traditional approaches to economics and long term planning. For stable societies and a sustainable future for people and planet, our efforts integrate conceptions of development that centre holistic wellbeing over flattening metrics such as GDP.
We mean flourishing in a collective as well as individual sense. Massive wealth inequality, social stasis, and the structures that permit these, risk collapse as much as ecological or technological risks. They deserve our focus, too.
"Those who plant trees, knowing that only others will enjoy the shade, are public benefactors."
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Developing Wise Institutions
Improving institutional decision making (IIDM) has considerable overlap with several cause areas, suggesting its own robustness as a cause area. However it also remains relatively under-leveraged within Effective Altruism; particularly deliberation, decision making under deep uncertainty, and foresight mechanisms deployed therein.
In particular, extant organisations neglect deliberative democracy as particularly effective, tractable, and impactful despite theoretical and empirical successes. We intend to blend deliberative mechanisms (both in person, and via tools such as pol.is) with foresight exercises, and expert aggregation methods such as Horizon Scanning using e.g BARD.
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In the short term, we see that citizen assemblies can be convened quickly, producing enhanced results against policy making as it currently exists. For the medium term, we see it as a means to address neglecting skin in the game and collective intelligence, the underutilisation of which can be costly, particularly to intercausal and holistic approaches to civilisational risk. We also see it demonstrating improvements in longtermist deliberation, for example with the Japanese study in Yahaba Town.
Anticipating Global Resilience
We w​elcome a growing appreciation for the irreducible interconnections at systemic levels that amplify intercausal risk, itself contributing to compound, interconnected, interacting, and cascade risks.
Through complexity modelling, agent based, and systems dynamical modelling, we intend to execute decision making under deep uncertainty, fostering greater integration of the natural and social sciences for enhanced understanding of solutions.
This approach is further informed by historical data and current trends within biophysical, informational, and multiscale political (regional, national, and global) trends. We believe in particular with subpar policy responses to climate change, collapse risk deserves far greater attention in an expansive framework for GCR.
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The risk of astronomical suffering only increases as technological potency and political failures accumulate; escalating conflict dynamics constitute under-explored components of avoiding collapse.
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A combination of developing existential and deliberative mechanisms will be explored in the interests of diffusing the 'hidden variables' behind much of malevolent actors' and perverse incentives, with all their incumbent second order impacts on Civilisational Risk.
Nurturing Flourishing & Wellbeing
Focusing on the long term future may not be the only framework for mitigating X-risk and GCR, but it is a vital lens, especially when working on neglected "broad approaches" that appear robust.
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Value lock-in is a major risk in the long run, with our era arguably having as crucial a position as the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment did on the nascent principles and institutions of the modern era.
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Accordingly, we emphasise buttressing what Nick Beckstead has outlined as "coordination, capability, motives, and information" capacities today are crucial. Besides IIDM above, we also identify open science and meta-research as associated reforms within the 'Odyssean democratic' framework, as enormous amounts of knowledge and technological development may be unduly constrained by publishing houses today.