Welcome to Better Skeptics

As fear and confusion covered the planet early in 2020 when the extent of the COVID-19 pandemic became apparent, many of us watched as trusted institutions failed again and again to converge on factual matters, as they weighed a developing reality against a multitude of internal and external commitments. These institutions, some decades old, others centuries, were struggling to adapt to a real-time world that demanded of them answers much faster than they could converge on questions.

Watching humanity's sensemaking apparatus falter, we're also concerned about the wave of bad ideas that follows. Just as someone who doesn't trust the tap water isn't better off drinking from the sewer, we feel compelled to build a better lens through which truth can be approached.

This will likely mean evolving a new set of sensemaking tools, ones that instead of centralized gatekeepers rely on principles of distributed trust and bottom-up transparency. Tools that are open source so that anyone can duplicate, modify, and experiment with.

Examples of such new tools have already popped up organically. Amid the pandemic, decentralized, improvised grassroots groups such as Project Evidence and DRASTIC have been instrumental in exposing facts and bringing light to the discussion.

With varied backgrounds from journalism and entrepreneurship to technology and online communities, we are committed to developing pragmatic solutions that are adapted to today's connected, always-on world, taking the best of what's available, and inventing new principles where necessary.

Many of our experiments will likely fail, and that's OK. They'll hopefully do so in interesting ways, and it is only through iteration, divergence, and convergence, that the most potent protocols will be discovered.

Watch this space for our first experiments, coming soon!