Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing a new organization: Epistea, published by Epistea on May 22, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Summary

We are announcing a new organization called Epistea. Epistea supports projects in the space of existential security, epistemics, rationality, and effective altruism. Some projects we initiate and run ourselves, and some projects we support by providing infrastructure, know-how, staff, operations, or fiscal sponsorship.

Our current projects are FIXED POINT, Prague Fall Season, and the Epistea Residency Program. We support ACS (Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group), PIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems), and HAAISS (Human Aligned AI Summer School).

History and context

Epistea was initially founded in 2019 as a rationality and epistemics research and education organization by Jan Kulveit and a small group of collaborators. They ran an experimental workshop on group rationality, the Epistea Summer Experiment in the summer of 2019 and were planning on organizing a series of rationality workshops in 2020. The pandemic paused plans to run workshops and most of the original staff have moved on to other projects.

In 2022, Irena Kotíková was looking for an organization to fiscally sponsor her upcoming projects. Together with Jan, they decided to revamp Epistea as an umbrella organization for a wide range of projects related to epistemics and existential security, under Irena’s leadership.

What?

Epistea is a service organization that creates, runs, and supports projects that help with clear thinking and scale-sensitive caring. We believe that actions in sensitive areas such as existential risk mitigation often follow from good epistemics, and we are particularly interested in supporting efforts in this direction.

The core Epistea team is based in Prague, Czech Republic, and works primarily in person there, although we support projects worldwide. As we are based in continental Europe and in the EU, we are a good fit for projects located in the EU.

We provide the following services:

Fiscal sponsorship (managing payments, accounting, and overall finances)

Administrative and operations support (booking travel, accommodation, reimbursements, applications, visas)

Events organization and support (conferences, retreats, workshops)

Ad hoc operations support

We currently run the following projects:

FIXED POINT

Fixed Point is a community and coworking space situated in Prague. The space is optimized for intellectual work and interesting conversations but also prioritizes work-life balance. You can read more about FIXED POINT here.

Prague Fall Season

PFS is a new model for global movement building which we piloted in 2022. The goal of the Season is to have a high concentration of people and events, in a limited time, in one space, and working on a specific set of problems. This allows for better coordination and efficiency and creates more opportunities for people to collaborate, co-create and co-work on important projects together, possibly in a new location - different from their usual space. Part of PFS is a residency program. You can read more about the Prague Fall Season here.

Additionally, we support:

ACS - Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group

PIBBSS - Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems

HAAISS - Human Aligned AI Summer School

Who?

Irena Kotíková leads a team of 4 full-time staff and 4 contractors:

Jana Meixnerová - Head of Programs, focus on the Prague Fall Season

Viktorie Havlíčková - Head of Operations

Martin Hrádela - Facilities Manager, focus on Fixed Point

Jan Šrajhans - User Experience Specialist

Karin Neumanová - Interior Designer

Linh Dan Leová - Operations Associate

Jiří Nádvorník - Special Projects

František Drahota - Special Projects

The team has a wide range of experience...