Valuescience: Applying Science to Discern and to Realize Value

Each of us has ideas about value—about what we want and how to get it. With these ideas we express preferences regarding many aspects of life, from commerce, to character, to philanthropy.

We underpin and justify our lives with ideas about value, making them important elements of much that we are and do. By re-examining these ideas, and more fundamentally, how we arrive at them we can address individual, social, and environmental challenges at their roots and in an integrated way.

Ideas about what we want and how to get it are future-oriented, since we can fulfill want only in the future, whether a split-second or a century from now. They are predictions that with one or another means we can attain or avert particular outcomes, and that by doing so we'll be satisfied.

Predictions embedded in ideas about value are descriptions of material phenomena. With them we characterize observable states of human beings interacting with the environment. Like all descriptions, however precise and complete, they are different from what we represent with them. As Albert Korzybski, founder of general semantics famously reminded us, "A map is not the territory."

When we feel surprised about outcomes of behaviors, or about responses to attaining or avoiding, or failing to attain or avoid something, we discover differences between ideas about value and value itself. We realize that we attached more confidence to predictions embedded in these ideas than their accuracy warranted, that is, we thought we knew value better than we did.

In the ubiquitousness of such experience we can see evidence of fundamental flaws in how we and those around us arrive at ideas about value. For millenia humans have believed that we might know value absolutely and precisely. We've imagined that value was ours to decide. Embracing one or another thing as good or desired and shunning others as bad or unwanted, we've passed ideas about preference from one generation to the next, sometimes as unquestionable, ironclad rules. We've accepted and promulgated notions about value without thoroughly examining evidence for predictions embodied in them or urging others to do so

In the early 21st century, as humankind experiences unprecedentedly large, numerous, diverse, and threatening consequences of attempts to realize value, a growing number of people are questioning traditional approaches. Some, aware that science is the sole demonstrated method for assessing the possibility of, and making better-than-random predictions, are exploring potential benefits of a scientific approach to value, one by which we acknowledge that value is ours to discern, rather than to decide, and that we will be forever short of perfect understanding of value. Behavioral economists, evolutionary psychologists, ecological anthropologists, religious progressives, advocates for evidence-based medicine and management and for science-based natural resource policy, and a host of others are shaping an emergent valuescience movement.

At Magic we're developing and disseminating valuescience as means to further common good. We hone our practices and assist others in honing theirs through research, demonstration projects, teaching, consulting, and publishing. Thank you for your interest in Magic and for your consideration of valuescience. We welcome your partnership.