Valuescience - Shedding Illusion to Live and Die Well

From Valuescience
Revision as of 15:25, 29 June 2016 by Dschrom (Talk) (What do you want? How can you get it? How do you know?)

Jump to: navigation, search

Final Exam Questions


What do you want? How can you get it? How do you know?

"Ideas about value—about what we want and how to get it—are future-oriented. They rest upon prediction. Science, sole demonstrated means for making predictions better than we can make by chance, is how we more accurately discern and more fully realize value." ~ David Schrom, Valuescience

Course

Valuescience: Shedding Illusion to Live Better

Stanford University PSYC 136A/236A (autumn); PSYC 136B/236B (spring)
3 units without lab; 4 units with lab
Tu, Th 10:30am-11:50am; Sequoia 200 (spring, 2016; varies with quarter)


Course Description

This course is an opportunity to bring information from many disciplines to bear upon three central questions of our lives: "What do I want?" "How can I get it?" and most importantly, "How do I know?" We frequently ask the first two questions about everything from big choices like career and marriage to little ones like what we'll eat for lunch today. We ask the third far less often, despite implications of how we respond to it for how we respond to the other two. Perils of this approach are obvious. If we rely upon flawed means of knowing, what we think we know is more likely error.

All of us have experienced getting what we thought we wanted and feeling disappointed, and all of us have sometimes done what we thought sufficient and come up short. Again and again we think we know ends and means of our lives—our values—only to discover that we're mistaken. With current approaches to value we repeatedly generate overconfidence and error. Though we work to learn from our mistakes, we rarely delve deep enough to re-examine methods on which we rely to address questions of value. Even when we ask, "How do I know," we're often quick to answer with long-held, well-practiced justifications yet to be critically scrutinized to their roots, and poorly able to withstand such scrutiny.

Values are preferences, inherently forward looking and rooted in prediction. Science is sole demonstrated means by which humans predict with better-than-random success. Nearly all of us embrace ideas about value for which we lack evidence and reason sufficient to make successful predictions. In doing so we live illusion, and make disappointment and dissatisfaction more likely than necessary for ourselves and for others. As humans become more numerous and more powerful, consequences of our actions affect to a larger extent than ever before Earth, fellow humans, and other life. To secure our existence and that of those who may follow, we require means to better limit error.

In this course we explore history, philosophy, ecology, economics, sociology, linguistics, psychology, and more to learn how we may apply science to discern value more accurately and to realize it more fully.

We begin by framing our inquiry within a larger context of ecology, evolution, culture, and education. We consider how we've come to current ideas about value, about science, and about their relationship. We examine how we underpin personal, social, and environmental well-being and ills with those ideas.

We then present a case for valuescience, showing how we can apply it to achieve more accurate understanding of human history, present condition, and prospects, and how we can apply it to know better what we want and to get it. We pay particular attention to perceptual, cognitive, and cultural impediments to valuescience, and to strategies for overcoming these, and we offer opportunity to practice doing so.


Course Objectives

We aim for each participant to learn to write and speak cogently about each of the following topics, evidencing some familiarity with historical and contemporary trends and events as described in published works of others, and demonstrating independent thought grounded at least to some degree in personal practice:
(1) State a valuescience thesis, beginning with definitions of “value” and “science” to emphasize their nexus, prediction, and concluding with an argument based upon evidence and reason that science is sole demonstrated means to more accurately discern and more fully realize value.
(2) Outline key elements of world-view common today with reference to their historical roots, methods by which they are promulgated and reinforced, interests served by their persistence, conflicts with science, and consequences for human well-being.
(3) Describe how emergent consilience of natural science, social science, and humanities can be basis for constructing a more accurate world-view, for shedding illusion about value and contributing to others' doing so, and for thereby improving our and their lives.
(4) Outline key elements of a consilient science-based world-view and give examples of how you have relied upon it, how you can rely more heavily upon it, and how you can contribute to others' relying more heavily upon it to live and die well.



Development of this Valuescience course is an educational endeavor of Magic, a Palo Alto based public service organization.