What passes for public argument these days, if we’re honest, is fairly embarrassing—trite opinion, manufactured conflict. What is needed is a whole new media environment defined by lively disagreement and honest conviction.
Wisdom of Crowds is part of a larger project in close collaboration with Aspen Institute’s Philosophy & Society Initiative—an ecosystem of people that willingly face their basic principles and all the tensions they entail. We’re experimenting with this ethos in the podcast and in the essays we publish. It shows up in the guests we invite and the debates we host. It also shows up in Aspen’s Philosophers Salon, and in our co-hosted events in DC and elsewhere. We try to find as many ways as we can for our listeners and readers to jump into the fray with us, explicating their principles and pushing us on ours.
We seek to have a wide array of partners as well. Our operations are funded in part thanks to generous donations from the Open Society Foundation, The University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets, the John Templeton Foundation.
