Volitional Science

Maybe, maybe not.

A lot of it depends on your definition of "science."

I've come around to the view that Volitional Science is a much a science as any Social Science.

Galambos likes to say that Volitional Science is a science because it is based on the scientific method. The scientific method is:

1. Look around
2. Form a hypothesis about how something behaves that allows you to predict future behavior
3. Formulate an experiment to test your hypothesis
4. Check the results of your experiment against your prediction
5. Repeat 3-4 until either (a) you and your peers are convinced that your hypothesis is correct, at which point it can be promoted to the status of "theory"; or (b) the results of your experiment are so at variance with your prediction that you go back to step 1.

Here's a bit more precise (but still friendly) description of the scientific method that Google found for me. (BTW, everytime you search Google from the AtGP home page I make $0.03!)

Galambos looked around and decided that, in the words of Systemantics, "things weren't working very well." A lot of this happened while he was at work at "the boondoggle" which was his name for the aerospace company (North American Aviation) he worked for. He was fairly appalled at the lack of efficiency and the lack of receptivity to new and improved methods for launching rockets.

At some point he came up with the hypothesis that things would work much better if (a) everything was either privately owned and operated "for profit"; and (b) all human interaction was non-coercive. He also defined property in such a way that innovation became property and hypothesized that the world would work better if innovators were recognized and rewarded for creating new property instead of the current system where the vast majority of ideas are used without proper credit to the innovator (never mind about the permission of the innovator - that's too complicated to get into now).

At least for the currently published work (course V-50 as transcribed in Sic Itur Ad Astra), he pretty much stopped there at step 2. He claims that because he has true inputs to a rigorous and correct logical thought process that he "knows" that his hypothesis is correct and it really is a theory. Unfortunately, SIAA has a lot of logical errors and sloppy reasoning in it.

[Did I mention that I started a Volitional Science discussion list at eGroups.com? It was my wife Kayler's idea but she is too busy homeschooling three kids to run it so I moderate it. The following is taken from a post I made there.]

"The majority (vast majority) of feedback I've gotten from smart people I've tried to introduce to Volitional Science via SIAA is that having once claimed from the start that Physics is the basis of Volitional Science, Galambos proceeds to ignore Physics in most of the book. Where are the experiments? Where's the math? What do you measure? Increases in happiness? What's the validation? It takes more than logical arguments to turn ideology into Physics, me-thinks. And then Galambos will mis-quote actual Physics. The best example which my friend David Satnik pointed out to me is the claim that one of the laws of thermodynamics says "you can't get something for nothing" as a justification for why civilizations collapse. There are two problems with this statement - one, Galambos is using the law of thermodynamics in a context for which it was never designed without sufficient justification; and two, he's using the law incorrectly. The laws of thermodynamics refer to closed systems. Our system is not closed, as the sun is pumping in vast amounts of energy (for one example). There are a number of places where Galambos makes these leaps without justification, and this is off-putting to many people with a significant scientific background."

So, the science is sloppy at best.

Social Science? Sure. Physics? I think not.

This irritates me quite a bit, because I think Galambos has some really good ideas. It's just that he shoots himself in the foot a lot. First, he claims that his hypothesis is a theory but justifies it only anecdotally. Then he makes mis-statements about real physics. Then he skims over supposed "proofs", for instance, his corollary that "all volitional beings live to acquire property."

Well, perhaps the idea of Volitional Science is okay, even if the existing writing on the subject is not sufficiently scientific.

Okay. Galambos was sloppy and he abuses Physics.

Well, I still think the idea of exploring a zero-coercive world is cool, so I'm going to keep working at it.