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The human colony on the planet Argo has long explored and exploited the technology left behind by an extinct alien race. But then an archaeology team accidentally activates a terrible weapon...
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-- Locus Magazine"Star Dragon is steeped in cosmology, the physics of interstellar travel, exobiology, artificial intelligence, bioscience. Brotherton, author of many scientific articles in refereed journals, has written a dramatic, provocative, utterly convincing hard science sf novel that includes an ironic twist that fans will love."
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What If Everyone Was Smart and Rational?
December 2nd, 2008
I mean it, literally, as a premise for a story to learn about ourselves.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about subtle science fiction, in which human nature was explored by changing some aspect of human nature and seeing the results, rather than the more common juxtaposition of human beings in novel or extreme circumstances.
There isn’t much subtle science fiction out there. I think it’s tremendously difficult to conceptualize, let alone to write.
I’ve been on a kick lately, perhaps more than a kick, about the importance of rational thinking and how humans are so bad at it. As a scientist I regularly see the power of reason in solving problems and learning new things about how the universe works. As an American who has seen more than a few Presidential election cycles and watched TV shows of all types, I also regularly see the stupidity and irrationality of my species proudly on display. And Americans, on the whole, are better educated than most in the world.
So, I was just wondering: what if everyone was smart and rational? All the time?
I’m not asking what the planet Vulcan is like. There’s still plenty of room for emotion, art, humor, and more in a rational world. There would still be good and evil, and motivated self-interest, as well as self-sacrifice. But a lot of things would be different.
Here are some things that I think would have to go into the world-building:
Fear-mongering would be finished, except when based on actual threats. Then the actual threats would be evaluated and appropriately addressed. This would have prevented Iraq (the faulty intelligence wouldn’t have been an issue), sensationalist TV (what, another death-threat from germs in my kitchen?), and more.
Ideology would be finished, or much diminished. Things like school vouchers would be evaluated and adopted, or dropped. Abstinence-only education would be over. No one could get away with the idea that tax cuts are always a good idea, or less regulations are always a good idea, etc.
Liars would be recognized and ostracized. Rush Limbaugh would have no audience, and in fact, I don’t think he could even exist in the world I am imagining.
And some issues would vanish completely, like fundamentalist terrorism. Smart, rational people do not kill themselves over promises of doe-eyed virgins in an afterlife. It could however be replaced by a terrorism that engages in a battle with a superpower in the only feasbile manner possible.
Boring, easy jobs would probably pay better than interesting and challenging jobs. Education would be more valuable, as it would be something everyone sought and would be a way to distinguish between different capable people.
Advertising would change into something more fact-oriented.
We might even all go adopt a single language like Esperanto.
There would still be conflict, of course. Politicians would be more openly Machiavellian, for better or worse.
Bureaucracy would be minimal.
Of course, the entire world would look nothing like it does today. All of history would have to be different. You might as well write about aliens, or radically altered humans colonizing a new world. That’s what makes this style of science fiction so hard to write. It has to have some relationship to our world today, or it isn’t even intelligable.
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Have you read Keith Laumer’s novel “Brain Wave”? It’s a bit like this, except the plot device is that suddenly everyone BECOMES smart, and what happens as a result of that change.
I’ve been thinking along these lines too, but instead of thinking what if everyone was smart and rational, I was wondering what if everyone was scientific in their thinking. Some people might see that as the same thing, but there are plenty of smart and rational philosophers that aren’t scientific.
I was wondering what the world would be like if everyone expected a certain amount of solid evidence before they acted, but also, what would the population be like if it had scientific curiosity?
I was watching a documentary the other night on Independent Lens about the Fermi lab and the hunt for the Higgs boson. Many people wanted to take away particle physics research funding because they couldn’t see the point.
What kind of population minds spending a few hundred million to answer some of the most fundamental questions about the nature of reality? They kept asking the scientists how they justify the cost of their research, and I kept thinking, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.
I’m reading Natalie Angier’s The Canon, which tries to explain why the public doesn’t care for science and why it should.
I think we need to ask why people aren’t smart, rational and scientific.
Jim
That actually would be Poul Anderson’s “Brain Wave”…Excellent “Golden Age” book!
BRAIN WAVE sounds very interesting.
The curiosity thing is a whole different animal, and potentially more important and interesting. I’ve seen loads of people smart enough to be a scientist, yet fail for lack of curiosity.
Why not teach a common neutral non-national language, in all countries, in all schools, worldwide?
An interesting video can be seen at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670 and a glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Rational behavior does not always lead to optimal outcomes. The Prisoner’s Dilemma and The Tragedy of the Commons demonstrate how smart and rational behavior at the individual level leads to a poor collective outcome. Fiction premised on a society composed entirely of smart rational actors, to be satisfying for this reader, must deal with The Tragedy of the Commons scenario, either as a central feature or a background detail.
Dan, great point. That was something I intended to discuss briefly in the post, and forgot about. Sometimes the evidence leads to an incorrect conclusion, and you want to have a marketplace of ideas and actions to find the empirical result.
But wouldn’t the rational society choose to make some side bets on longshots?
As another issue, the tragedy of the commons scenario in general is the one I see lacking in conservative thought, at almost all levels. A current example. The resistance to an automaker bailout, based on free market ideology and a smaller personal interest in these companies, seems more than offset by collective damage that all will suffer from.
I would like to think that a society in which every actor is smart and rational would find away to ensure that individual rational decisions not have catastrophic collective consequences. Such a society ought not to allow complete individual freedom, but should constrain individual actions to avoid The Tragedy of the Commons. In other words, it is smart and rational to accede to some constraints on your own individual freedom (smart and rational constraints). Here’s a story premise: human space explorers find planet with two humanoid species co-existing, a technological society and a hunter-gatherer society. The technological society turns out to be much less intelligent and rational, on average, than the hunter gatherers, who are the truly smart and rational ones. Their way of life is sustainable. The technological society is doomed to self-destruct, precisely because of The Tragedy of the Commons.
Except I think that hunter-gatherer societies are not sustainable, either. They’re a myth as much as any conservative or liberal position in the absence of particulars. There are always changing circumstances, like environmental stresses, and hunter-gatherer societies are quite vulnerable. Does our low-tech society get birth control? Or are they rational to suffer periodic starvation? They’re just as subject to the tragedy of the commons, if not more so, since they do not have the tools of technology to solve their problems.
Doh! Thanks for correcting my author mixup, Fred. I read it so long ago… Clearly the brain wave bypassed me.