A3 Society
| Formation | 2010 (A3 Society); 2013 (A3 Research Institute) |
|---|---|
| Founder | Bruce Nappi |
| Type | Non-profit research and education organization |
| Purpose | Research on human reasoning and communication, structured deliberation, and social sustainability |
| Headquarters | Massachusetts, United States |
Key people | Bruce Nappi (founder and director) |
| Website | a3society.org |
The A3 Society and the associated A3 Research Institute are non-profit organizations founded in Massachusetts by the engineer and independent researcher Bruce Nappi — the Society in 2010, the Research Institute in 2013. They are the institutional vehicle for the non-physics half of Nappi's work: his analysis of why institutions, science among them, fail to recognize and absorb correct new ideas, and his proposals for repairing that failure.
Nappi is separately known in dissident physics for Space Lattice Theory; the two strands are connected in his account, since he regards the reception of unorthodox physics as a case study in the communication failures the A3 organizations exist to address.
The "A3" concept
The name refers to what Nappi calls "Awareness Level 3" — a level or component of human consciousness that he distinguishes from the "A2" reasoning he takes to be typical of most people. He proposes that A3 awareness allows a person to visualize complex solutions at the level of whole societies, that it is present in only a small proportion of human beings, and that major advances in human history have depended on it. On this view social progress requires collaboration between the two, rather than the dominance of either.
These are Nappi's own claims and are not established findings; the Society's stated purpose includes identifying such thinkers and supporting them in leadership roles.
Structured communication
The organizations' most concrete research line concerns structured deliberation. Nappi argues that unstructured discussion — the default in committees, forums and conferences alike — dissipates effort without converging on conclusions, and that formally structured deliberation is required if a group is to reason collectively rather than merely exchange positions. The A3 Research Institute has worked toward a "Deliberatorium", a structured discussion tool, described as still in development.
He applied this analysis directly to the dissident science community in the paper Improving CNPS effectiveness through structured communication (2016), presented to the John Chappell Natural Philosophy Society, arguing that the community's collective effort is wasted without a structure that lets it converge.
Collapse and Personalized Democracy
Nappi's Collapse 2020 books, published through these organizations, argue that societal collapse is not fundamentally driven by resource depletion, crop failure or environmental degradation — which he treats as symptoms — but by flaws built into institutions by incompetent leadership, and ultimately by limits in how human beings reason and communicate. His proposed remedy, "Personalized Democracy", would give citizens direct access to government and direct control over legislation.