Living a Win-Win-Win Life

Snelson presented his first new seminar on Andrew J. Galambos' Volitional Science in thirty years, blending it with his own insights in what he calls the Science of Social Causality. His presentation, Can Science Save Us From Self-Extinction was centered on deserting our learned opinions in the social sciences for positions we verify to be true. Applying scientific method instead of expert opinion for re-engineering and application of our knowledge.

Michael Shermer is well known for his monthly column in Scientific American and for founding Skeptic magazine and The Skeptic Society. His lecture was on evolutionary economics, and dealt mainly with recent geometric complexity growth, and how we have been unable to socially adapt from tribal mores to open markets and globalization. I found I had already written on many of his subjects such as the economic ecosystem, although my approach is different.

What I had written in my notebook prior to the lectures reflected my anticipations, and was an effort to prepare an open mind for areas that I was sure to disagree with thoughtful speakers.

"I expect elitist arrogance and closed minds, much like attending an Objectivist meeting. Open minds and attitudes will be a pleasant surprise."

I didn't write it down, but one of my goals at such functions is to consciously keep my own mind open, seeking ideas that make me uncomfortable - the better to root out my own errors. Those ideas comprise the bulk of my rather skimpy notes and all were from Snelson's lecture. These notes will be reviewed several times over the next few weeks, and occasionally as warranted later.

Snelson pointed out an assertion Galambos (Galambos was an astrophysicist and professor) made; most of our scientific advances have come in physics, a more limited number in the biological sciences, and almost none in the social sciences that are still limited by using a-priori reasoning rather than scientific method.

He acknowledged the difficulties of changing minds set in academic concrete. Brilliant and well educated experts revere and protect their current intellectual positions; change being perceived as an assault on their status and reputations.

I've experienced this resistance, and have shared a quote in my Ignorance lens that Snelson used in his presentation. He quoted the father of quantum physics:

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning." - Max Planck

Like artists, great scientists are seldom recognized during their lives. Usually vilified and cast out, breakthrough scientists are lucky if they are just ignored. Scientific Method be hanged, historic ideas persist in scientific circles against testable and verified truth.

As Max Planck said "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Also consider what futurist Arthur C. Clark observed concerning how scientific innovations are resisted: "...don't be surprised if the world again witnesses the four stages of response to any new and revolutionary development: 1. It's crazy! 2. It may be possible - so what? 3. I said it was a good idea all along. 4. I thought of it first."

Give credit to Jay Snelson for the thought and effort he has expended; and his persistence. As far as I'm concerned, you can take credit for developing anything I've added as win-win-win, as long as you help it spread.

excerpt from To The Youth, by Fredrich Bastiat:

... Now the nature of this solution, as you readily understand, will depend greatly upon whether men's interests are, in fact, harmonious or antagonistic to one another.

If they are harmonious, the answer to our problem is to be found in liberty; if they are antagonistic, in coercion. In the first case, it is enough not to interfere; in the second, we must, inevitably, interfere.

But liberty can assume only one form. When we are certain that each one of the molecules composing a liquid has within it everything that is needed to determine the general level, we conclude that the simplest and surest way to obtain this level is not to interfere with the molecules. All those who accept as their starting point the thesis that men's interests are harmonious will agree that the practical solution to the social problem is simply not to thwart these interests or to try to redirect them.

Coercion, on the other hand, can assume countless forms in response to countless points of view. Therefore, those schools of thought that start with the assumption that men's interests are antagonistic to one another have never yet done anything to solve the problem except to eliminate liberty. They are still trying to ascertain which, out of all the infinite forms that coercion can assume, is the right one, or indeed if there is any right one. And, if they ever do reach any agreement as to which form of coercion they prefer, there will still remain the final difficulty of getting all men everywhere to accept it freely.

But, if we accept the hypothesis that men's interests are by their very nature inevitably bound to clash, that this conflict can be averted only by the capricious invention of an artificial social order, then the condition of mankind is indeed precarious, and we must fearfully ask ourselves:

1. Shall we be able to find someone who has invented a satisfactory form of coercion?

2. Will this man be able to win over to his plan the countless schools of thought that have conceived of other forms?

3. Will mankind submit to this form, which, according to our hypothesis, must run counter to every man's self-interest?

4. Assuming that humanity will consent to being rigged out in this garment, what will happen if another inventor arrives with a better garment? Are men to preserve a bad social order, knowing that it is bad; or are they to change their social order every morning, according to the whims of fashion and the ingeniousness of the inventors?

5. Will not all the inventors whose plans have been rejected now unite against the accepted plan with all the better chance of destroying it because, by its very nature and design, it runs counter to every man's self-interest?

6. And, in the last analysis, is there any one human force capable of overcoming the fundamental antagonism which is assumed to be characteristic of all human forces?

I could go on indefinitely asking such questions and could, for example, bring up this difficulty: If you consider individual self-interest as antagonistic to the general interest, where do you propose to establish the acting principle of coercion? Where will you put its fulcrum? Will it be outside of humanity?

It would have to be, in order to escape the consequences of your law. For if you entrust men with arbitrary power, you must first prove that these men are molded of a different clay from the rest of us; that they, unlike us, will never be moved by the inevitable principle of self-interest; and that when they are placed in a situation where there can be no possible restraint upon them or any resistance to them, their minds will be exempt from error, their hands from greed, and their hearts from covetousness...

(Seek out C. F. Bastiat on the net.)

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