“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
― E.F. Schumacher
Psychohistory is a fictional science in Issac Asimov’s Foundation universe. It combines history, sociology and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behaviour of very large groups of people.
Second Foundation consists of a group of heterodox thinkers today, those who are prepared to share what they know about stalled progress and pathologies in: markets, culture, and in science.
Our aim is to reboot failed coordination and communication attempts.
ABOUT SECOND FOUNDATION
High priority existential risks emerge directly from disorders of communication. Such disorder is one reason it has become harder to build new science and technology. Second Foundation (SF) plans to improve the situation by modeling and studying the prevailing adverse social incentives and the breakdowns in communication in academia, gated institutions, local markets, and the broader economy.
We are an interdisciplinary group of individuals who, as academics and entrepreneurs, have invented technologies that pervade contemporary society or are poised to do so in the coming decades. This includes work in high-impact areas such as precision engineering, new media, green tech, and computing – along with contributions to fundamental science, behavioral economics, the origins of life and complexity, and artificial intelligence.
The Second Foundation’s thesis is that there is a kind of “Gresham’s Law” that applies to research, meta-research, and to scientific work in established fields. By this, we mean that poorer quality research tends to drown out the higher impact work, due to academic conservatism, and the prevailing centralization and incentive structure of the grant process. This effect tends to appear particularly when funding incentives focus on rewarding popular themes: climate change and green energy, psychopathology, certain types of social justice, and machine learning, artificial intelligence, just to name a few. Our workshops and other less-conventional social opportunity events are crafted to encourage and facilitate across-discipline communication. Second Foundation (SF) – is founded and directed by visionary pioneers in fields like anthropology, ethics, quantum computing and machine intelligence labs.
With discourse initiated by renowned innovators and founders of academic disciplines, Second Foundation empowers both independent and academic researchers alike, typically including those who have been marginalized at every stage of their career.
Specifically we provide a forum, social coordination, and a means of disseminating ideas. Our aim is to voice institutional dissent and non-mainstream thought effectively. This will often involve communication with talented outsiders coming from diverse backgrounds, who would otherwise be excluded from conversations on critical foundational questions. We believe such private coordination will bring about faster change and vast improvements in research outcomes by lessening the social pressure of early-stage scientists to conform to existing canon.