Theme: Education

PROBLEM: ADAPTING TO THE UNIFICATION OF THE SCIENCES
(our resistance to the formalization of the behavioral sciences)

FWIW: One of the problems we (all) face is that people don’t expect to understand the physical sciences but oddly enough, expect to understand the behavioral, ethical, and moral sciences of cooperation and dispute resolution. Why? It’s more tangible to us. Why? It’s the means we use to pretend our negotiating position (justification) of our biases is moral rather than within the limits of what is moral without prosecution and retaliation. 😉

So, just as we have paid the high cost to transition populations to scientific understanding in the physical world – and the profound returns – we will now have to pay the high cost of transitioning populations to the scientific understanding of the behavioral and evolutionary world – to obtain the even greater profound returns.

So, in that sense, I expect even greater resistance than Socrates, Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin, because the progress of science is moving from producing decidability in that which is abstract to the individual, to that which is tangible to his beliefs, to that which is tangible to his display word and deed – and eliminates one’s ability to engage in magical thinking as a means of sedation.

So I expect far greater resistance to my work than we saw even to Darwin’s. In fact, the post-war ideological warfare consists almost entirely of a counter-enlightenment against the Darwinian explanation for nearly all of existence. So we are still in the throws of denial of Darwin 170 years later. I would expect the same people on the right and left who resist the Darwinian revolution to resist this completion of the unification of the sciences – and for the same reasons.

Institutions lag. Humans change only when the people who have malinvested in a previous set of errors, die off, and give opportunities to those who invest in something less erroneous. We can thank Kuhn for that uncomfortable truth.

Cheers