Epistea

Epistea is a nonprofit registered association (Epistea, z.s.) based in Prague, Czech Republic, that serves as an umbrella organization for projects focused on existential security, epistemics, rationality, and effective altruism. Founded in June 2019 by Jan Kulveit and a small group of collaborators, the organization initially focused on rationality education and ran the Epistea Summer Experiment, an experimental workshop combining applied rationality with experiential education. In 2022, the organization was revamped under the leadership of Irena Kotikova as a broader umbrella and service organization. Epistea describes itself as creating, running, and supporting projects that help with clear thinking and scale-sensitive caring, with a particular focus on existential risk mitigation through improved epistemics. Epistea provides several types of support to affiliated projects: fiscal sponsorship and financial management, administrative and operations support (including travel, accommodation, visa assistance), events organization for conferences, retreats, and workshops, and ad hoc operational assistance. The organization serves as fiscal sponsor for notable research groups including the Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group (ACS) at Charles University Prague, PIBBSS (Principles of Intelligent Behavior in Biological and Social Systems), and HAAISS (Human-aligned AI Summer School). From 2022 to 2024, Epistea operated FixedPoint House, a community coworking space in central Prague with capacity for about 50 people, featuring offices, meeting rooms, a large event space, a garden, and guest accommodation. Through this space, the organization hosted the Prague Fall Season, a concentrated program of events, residencies, and intellectual collaboration running from September through December. The Epistea Residency Program invited teams of 3-5 members to work on projects related to epistemics, group rationality, and civilizational sanity, with mentoring from experts such as Anna Salamon. Epistea has also produced a series of workshops on epistemics, internal alignment, and group rationality, inspired by experiential education methodology. These workshops explore rationality through games, puzzles, and experiments rather than traditional classroom instruction. The organization has supported the EXP experimental summer workshop as a fiscal sponsor. The core team includes project leads Irena Kotikova, Viktorie Havlickova, and Jiri Nadvornik, with Jan Kulveit and Elizabeth Garrett as team members. The organization currently lacks institutional core funding and relies on project funding and overhead fees from sponsored projects.