Top-level areas
In our age of multiple pressures, dizzying opportunities, daunting risks, and accelerating disruption, what are the most important skills and principles to cherish and uphold?
The Vital Syllabus project (described here) aims to answer these questions. It aims, moreover, to draw attention to resources that can best assist students of all ages:
- To acquire and deepen these skills
- And to understand and embody the associated principles.
The proposed syllabus has been split into twenty-four top-level areas.

For resources related to each top-level area, click on the links that follow.
Note: This breakdown is subject to change as the project develops.
(1) Learning how to learn
How to pick up new skills quickly and reliably:
- The strengths and weaknesses of various online search tools
- Finding online courses that are best suited to individual needs
- Finding learning communities that can improve understanding
- Skills in evaluating the reliability of sources and communities
- The risks of overestimation of self-expertise
- Active learning
- Learning via playfulness and retrospectives
- How to consolidate new learning
- How to set aside previous learning that no longer pertains
- Knowing oneself better in order to learn in the best way
(2) Communications
Communications with a variety of different kinds of audiences:
- Speaking well
- Writing well
- The importance of narrative as well as facts
- Graphic and video design
- Immersive communications
- Understanding audience needs
- Building empathy
- Better listening for better communications
- Converting negative critics and trolls into constructive partners
- Pros and cons of different communications environments
(3) Agility
- Dividing up tasks into a series of short sprints
- Obtaining useful feedback at the end of each sprint
- Updating plans based on new information obtained
- Combining a series of short sprints into lasting positive change
- When Agile goes wrong
(4) Creativity
Going beyond existing methods and solutions:
- Methods for generating innovative new ideas
- Methods of evaluating innovative new ideas
- Methods for transforming new ideas into actual solutions
- Methods to decide between innovation and the status-quo
- Design and creativity
(5) Augmentation
Technology and tools to boost abilities:
- Traditional methods to boost memory, concentration, etc
- Uses of personal, wearable, and embedded technologies
- Biofeedback mechanisms
- Roles for brain-computer interfaces
- Tools that can act like a “personal guardian angel”
- Tools and techniques to strengthen critical thinking
- Tools and techniques to boost creativity
- Tools and techniques to boost resilience
- Tools and techniques to widen or deepen perspective
- The impact of various “consciousness raising” practices
(6) Collaboration
Becoming wiser and stronger together:
- Addressing individual blind-spots by collective analysis
- Designing teams to promote synergies rather than cancellation
- Forms of play and other team activities that boost mutual learning
- Strengths and weaknesses of wikis and other open systems
- Obstacles to collaboration
(7) Emotional health
- Mindfulness
- Playfulness and recreation
- The benefits of a growth mindset
- The strengths and weaknesses of positive thinking
- Not being slaves to inner anxieties and other “demons”
- Handling fear of failure
- Dealing with underperformance in oneself and others
- Failing forward and failing fast (associated with Agility)
- Social skills and perceptiveness
- Understanding, supporting, and valuing diversity
- Managing stress
- Links between emotional health and social circumstances
- Links between emotional health and physical health
(8) Physical health
Factors impacting physical health:
- Augmenting the body
- Accelerating personalised medicine
- Opportunities for all-round “better than well” health
- New options for fertility and pregnancy
- Opportunities for lives in a state of permanent youthful vitality
- Improving the health of our brains
- Anticipating the Longevity Escape Velocity
- Anticipating social changes due to greatly extended healthspans
(9) Foresight
- When forecasts were mistaken
- Forecasters and superforecasters
- The purpose of scenarios
- Identifying trends that have the potential to cause disruption
- The factors behind potential exponential change
- Identifying potential accelerators – and brakes – for trends
- Establishing “canary signals” for advance warning of tipping points
- How trends can combine to form breakthrough scenarios
- Examples of interconnections producing unforeseen scenarios
- Using imagination to anticipate novel scenarios
- Methods to evaluate the credibility of imagined scenarios
- Methods to evaluate the desirability of imagined scenarios
- Methods to assess actions to influence the actual course of scenarios
- Precautionary and proactionary approaches to risk and opportunity
(10) Leading change
Inspiring and maintaining transformations:
- Why major change initiatives often fail
- Positive methods to manage major change initiatives
- Cultivating a sense of urgency instead of complacency or resignation
- Building and managing a coalition to guide vital change
- Identifying and addressing misaligned incentives
- Moonshots and moonshot worship
- Crossing the chasm
(11) Technologies
In history, the present, and the future:
- The structure of industrial revolutions
- Technologies and overhang
- Energy systems
- Food, clothing, shelter, and beyond
- Nanotech
- Biotech
- Infotech
- Cognotech
- Virtual and Augmented Reality
- Robotics
- Quantum tech
- Space tech
- Social tech
(12) Economics
In history, the present, and the future:
- The positive accomplishments of free markets
- The failure modes of free markets
- The tragedy of the commons
- The mixed model
- The role of business
- The roles of money and banking
- Cryptocurrencies
- Tokenomics
- Protecting property
- Crime and punishment
- The circular economy
(13) Governance
In history, the present, and the future:
- Regulating technologies
- Incentivising technologies
- Evidence-based policy vs. ideology-based policy
- Socialism and its issues
- Egalitarianism and its issues
- Meritocracy and its issues
- Minimal governance
- Lean governance
- Self-regulating technologies
- Trustable monitoring
- The narrow corridor
- Redistribution
- Social safety nets and social contracts
- UBI and FALC
- Centralisation vs. decentralisation
- Industrial strategy
(14) Democracy
In history, the present, and the future:
- Technocracy and democracy
- The separation of powers
- Proactive vigilance
- Failure modes of democracy
- Deliberative democracy
- Enhancing democracy with AI
- The role of career politicians
- Beyond party politics
- Toward superdemocracy
(15) Geopolitics
Influencing political processes, nationally and internationally:
- Sovereignty and interdependence
- The international separation of powers
- Nuclear deterrence
- Alliances and partnerships
- Self-governing virtual states
- Seasteading
- Rejuvenating the Bretton Woods institutions
(16) Numeracy
Arithmetic and analysis for the modern age:
- Exponentials
- Probabilities
- Lies, damned lies, and statistics
- Estimating harm vs. ruin
- Complexity
- Numeracy for privacy and security
- Numeracy for fairness vs. bias
- Game theory
(17) Science
Distinguishing “good science” from “bad science”:
- When scientists were mistaken
- Normal science and revolutionary science
- Debates over scientific methods
- Science and human nature
- Cognitive biases
- Social pressures on science
- Science and consciousness
- Science and parascience (parapsychology)
- Potential limits of science
(18) Philosophy
- When philosophers were mistaken
- Practical examples of the impact of philosophical decisions
- The potential large impact of transcendent thinking
- Awareness of philosophical biases and fallacies
- Implications of modern science and tech for traditional worldviews
- Strengths and weaknesses of religions
- Strengths and weaknesses of humanism
- Theories of good and evil
- Virtue signalling
- Evaluating unborn generations
- Theories of mind
- Free will
- Approaches to determine ultimate priorities
- Evolving a framework for ethics fit for the 2020s
(19) Transhumanism
A philosophy particularly suited to the 2020s:
- Components of transhumanism
- Varieties of transhumanism
- The values of active transhumanism
- The transhumanist shadow
- Criticisms of transhumanism
- Transhumanist culture
- Anticipating the growth of transhumanism
(20) Culture
The basis for extended flourishing:
- Societies with increasingly diverse subcultures
- Limits to tolerant coexistence
- Coexistence with AIs and robots
- Coexistence with animals with uplifted capabilities
- Options for the future of work
(21) The environment
The context in which humanity exists:
- Our cosmic context
- Environmental independence and interdependence
- Planetary boundaries
- The co-evolution of life and mind
- Options for re-wilding
- Options for de-extinction
- Options for paradise engineering
- Options for exploring the wider universe
- Alien life and the Fermi paradox
(22) Landmines
Identifying and addressing the biggest risks ahead:
- The left behinds
- WMD proliferation
- Biotech hazards
- Infotech hazards
- Financial instabilities
- Environmental instabilities
- Political instabilities
- Cancers within society
- Reason under threat
- Divided nations
- Divided aging
- Bubbling under
- Existential opportunities
(23) The Singularity
Options for the advent of artificial superintelligence:
- The singularitarian stance
- The singularity shadow
- Different routes to ASI
- Hard and soft take-off
- Possible timescales to reach ASI
- The control problem
- The alignment problem
- Human-ASI merger
- No Planet B
- The singularity principles
- AGI or not AGI: fundamental choices
(24) Ultimate futures
- Picotech and femtotech
- Ultimate physics: births and deaths of universes
- Beyond human death: cryonics and reanimation
- Space-time engineering and technological resurrection
- The transcension hypothesis
- The simulation hypothesis
- Parallel multiverse branches: communication beyond base reality
Re-using this material:
The content of Vital Syllabus is available under CC BY 4.0 unless otherwise noted.