Smarts

How to become smarter and more effective

Tad Waddington, Ph.D. is the author of Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, a book that has won five prestigious awards. See full bio

January 15, 2009, Behavioral Economics

Comments on "On the science of goal-orientation"

On the science of goal-orientation

By Tad Waddington, Ph.D. on January 15, 2009 in Smarts

If you apply to med school to become a doctor, then is the future (your becoming a doctor) causing something in its past (your applying to med school)? Read More

on new order

Submitted by YG on January 16, 2009 - 12:47pm.

Hi Tad : )

I really like your blog!! I admit, though, I often have to reread a post several times before I can understand it. I can see why it's called "smarts" ;)

This post made my mind wander quite a bit..

It seems as though there's an underlying goal in humans to "seek order". This is probably why we thrive when we have effective leaders, governments, and religions. We crave having some sort of role model of sorts that our brain can then make value judgements against. This sense of order can either be considered morality or rationale and our brains seemed to have evolved these functions, emotional/logical reasoning for this purpose.

We don't thrive when we don't have effective leaders, governments, sciences, and/or religions to follow. One can tell by the discontent or disorder of the people under such institutions which work and which don't.

The non-living elements of the universe or the universe itself as it big-banged seemed to also evolve into ordered, structured laws which humans can learn and thus predict future occurences. Gravity and all of these things had to be "established", right? They couldn't have just existed before the universe existed, right?

Could chaos (in terms of chaos-theory) then simply be when a natural law is not "working" (to create order) and a different one needs to be developed or employed?

Is the universe itself "goal-oriented" in the same manner as humans? To create order and whatever laws are not creating order die off so to speak?

I obviously have no idea what chaos-theory is, and I don't expect you to explain it to me.. Perhaps I'm trying to find a scientific law to support the need for peace and finding the best-fit model for humans to follow in oder to achieve it:) Love becomes logical at some point..

For humans to thrive, it seems as though we need to embrace both the fact that we ARE goal-oriented (for survival, reproduction, meaningful work) and also to accept choas (needing to be able to chill out and not be goal-oriented at times and just be "mindful" or accepting, etc).

Perhaps both humans and the universe only do well when achieving a balance between being goal-oriented toward order and being non-goal oriented (and thus accepting of chaos so that new order can be established if needed). But what would this balance be called or what is the essence of this balance?

I'm going to Vegas this weekend to embrace some chaos. Scientific research ;)

Have a nice weekend!!

Half a dozen thoughts on your comment

Submitted by Tad Waddington on January 17, 2009 - 12:58pm.

Thanks, YG, for your comment. I had six thoughts:

1) I do intend for my posts to be thought-provoking so I hope you have to read them several times not because the writing is bad, but because you have to work out the implications of what they mean.

2) Your thought about us needing effective leaders to thrive resonates with a book I have on the drawing board about the role of emotions in leadership.

3) Chaos theory is really just a set of equations, not unlike the law of gravity, to explain the world. What is unique about these equations is A) how simple they are, B) how complex their output is, and C)how an infinitesimal change in the input can make a huge change in the output and vice versa.

4) One way to think about whether the universe itself is goal-oriented is to look at the history of science. When we stopped thinking about nature as being goal-directed, we started making real progress. It is for this reason that my note should be suspect. It runs in the face of 300 years of good science.

5) Regarding balance between goal- and non-goal orientation, between order and chaos, I can't come up with anything better than the Serenity Prayer: Accept what I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can. Would that I could.

6) On love becoming logical, my posts are building toward an explanation of how this works, but the explanation rests on a bunch of other ideas that I need to set in place first. If you are in a hurry, I'm taking it all from my book, Lasting Contribution. When I was younger at times I had to choose between a book and a meal so am planning on putting as much as I can online for free so others won't have to make that choice, a choice I fear will become more common for people in the days ahead.