Valuescience
From Valuescience
What do you want? How can you get it? How do you know?
- "Ideas about value—about want—are future-oriented and therefore entail prediction; science is the sole demonstrated means for making predictions better than we can make by chance; thus, science 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; Mon, Wed 11am-12:15pm; 160-317
- More accurately discern what we want and how to get it. Read history, philosophy, ecology, economics, sociology, linguistics and psychology pertinent to an ongoing cultural revolution by which people around the world are evolving a consilient foundation for an increasing range of human behavior. Study perceptual, cognitive, and social impediments to this enterprise; strategies for overcoming these; personal, social, and environmental consequences of doing so. Practice what we're learning.
Topics
- Week 1: Why? What? How?: With what purposes have we come together and how will we act to realize them?
- Week 2: Challenge of Living Well: What questions do we consider important to us personally and for humankind?
- Week 3: Foundations and Fences: What costs and benefits do we accrue from worldview and language?
- Week 4: Reconsidering Science: How shall we recharacterize and practice science to live better and contribute to others' doing so?
- Week 5: Scientific Worldview: How do people who rely upon information which can be a basis for successful prediction describe the universe and our place in it?
- Week 6: Reconsidering Value: What do humans want? How can we get it?
- Week 7: Evolving Self: How can we hone personal valuescience practices?
- Week 8: Evolving Society: How can we contribute to more widespread and competent valuescience practice?
- Week 9 & 10: Looking Backward and Forward: What have we learned? Where are we now? Where are we going?
- For a more detailed syllabus with class format and weekly readings, click here.
Development of this Valuescience course is an educational endeavor of Magic, a Palo Alto based public service organization.
