Difference between revisions of "Valuescience - Shedding Illusion to Live and Die Well"

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(Course)
(Course)
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:'''Stanford University PSYC 136A/236A (autumn); PSYC 136B/236B (spring)'''
 
:'''Stanford University PSYC 136A/236A (autumn); PSYC 136B/236B (spring)'''
  
:'''3 units without lab; 4 units with lab
+
:'''3 units without lab; 4 units with lab'''
Tu, Th 10:30am-11:50am; Sequoia 200 (autumn 2015; varies with quarter)'''
+
:'''Tu, Th 10:30am-11:50am; Sequoia 200 (autumn 2015; varies with quarter)'''
  
  

Revision as of 09:15, 23 September 2015

13 Final 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, the 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 (autumn 2015; 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? How do I know? We ask the first two questions frequently about everything from big choices like career and marriage to little ones like what we'll eat for lunch today. We ask the third less often.
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 the ends and means of our lives—our values—only to discover that we are 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 question the 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 examined to their roots.
Values are preferences, inherently forward looking and rooted in prediction. Science is the sole demonstrated means by which humans predict with better-than-random success. Nearly all of us embrace some 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 for ourselves and others. As humans become more numerous and more powerful, consequences of our actions affect more of the globe further into the future. 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 more accurately discern and more fully realize value. We consider how we've come to our 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 and our ways of arriving at them. 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 be able at the end of the course to write a few hundred words on each of the following topics, evidencing some familiarity with historical events and published works of others, and demonstrating independent thought grounded at least to some degree in practice:
(1) State a valuescience thesis, beginning with definitions of “value” and “science” to emphasize their nexus, prediction, and concluding with a claim about how we can use science, and only science to more accurately discern and more fully realize value.
(2) Outline key elements of world-view common today with reference to their historical roots, interests served by their persistence, conflicts with science, and consequences for human well-being.
(3) Describe how emergent consilience of natural and social science can be a basis for shedding illusion about value and contributing to others' doing so, and thereby improving our and their lives.



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