Three Main Lines Of The Project
Let us briefly trace the most important lines of my project from beginning to end.
1. From The Humanities To A Science Of The Human Being
The natural sciences improve our lives every day: through medicine, technology, communication, transportation, energy, programming, and artificial intelligence.
And what about the humanities?
Do they also bring much that is new and useful into our lives every day?
No?
Why not?
Do the humanities have such a possibility?
Of course they do. And it is right before our eyes.
People make decisions every day. These decisions affect not only the person who made them, but many other people as well.
People choose which task to take on, whom to cooperate with, which community to enter, when to argue, when to step back, and when to change strategy.
At these points, a person needs knowledge especially badly. But most often, the right knowledge is not available. People act by habit, intuition, fear, pressure from circumstances, or someone else’s advice.
Moreover, almost all important decisions are made among people. Therefore, a good decision must take into account not only my goals, but also the needs, abilities, limitations, and possible reactions of other people.
Here the humanities could help ordinary people right now. But for this, they need a radical reconstruction according to the standards of the natural sciences. In particular, they need a virtual world - an image of the real world - where images of people, communities, and tasks collide in a series of thought experiments. This would allow us to play out future encounters in advance and optimize behavior before and during the encounter.
2. The Virtual World: People, Tasks, Communities
Our virtual world consists of three types of entities: people, tasks, and communities.
It is not a metaphor, but a working model. In real life, a person constantly encounters tasks, other people, and communities. In the virtual world, we build their images and mentally experiment with them.
We are not interested in “the human being in general,” “the task in general,” or “the community in general,” but in a concrete person, a concrete task, and a concrete community.
What is especially interesting is how encounters between people, tasks, and communities happen.
If we predict failure, we will try to avoid the encounter: save resources and strengthen the reputation of a “lucky person.”
If success lies ahead, we will try not to miss the chance and use it to the maximum.
If we understand where our weakness lies, we will invite other people to cover the weak spot.
If we organize a project, we select people so that all tasks are covered.
If we organize a community, we tune it so as to attract some people and repel others.
And this is only a part of the possible applications.
3. The Student At The Exam: Warming-Up, Encodings, Levels
We want to study the human being: to understand what is inside. How can this be done?
If we want to understand how the object we are studying is structured internally, physicists have a special recipe for this: act on the object many times in the same way.
For example, Rutherford, in order to understand the structure of the atom, bombarded gold foil with alpha particles.
We can do something similar. Put a student in an oral exam. The teacher gives him tasks one by one and observes what happens.
This gives rise to the model of the task conveyor. The conveyor is not inside the student’s head. The conveyor is an external belt carrying tasks, just as Ford’s assembly line moved cars from one worker to another. And we observe how the student deals with them.
We can then assume that many life situations are arranged in a similar way. A secretary checks email. A tennis player returns a serve. A lecturer answers questions after a lecture. A manager sorts through a stream of problems. A parent responds to a child’s requests.
These situations are difficult to organize in a pure form. But they are similar to an oral exam: tasks come to a person one after another, and we can observe how he solves them.
Now the question is: what does the student’s success depend on? Why does one student receive a high score, and another does not?
One can say: one studied a lot, the other did not; one is smart, the other is not. But let us reverse the framing. How can we change the conditions of the task so that the student, with the same baggage, receives a higher score - or, conversely, a lower one?
The first factor is time. Give the student more time, and he will do better. Give him less time, and he will not manage to write down the solution he has found. This gives rise to the model of Warming-Up.
The second factor is communication. At driver’s license theory test centers in the United States, there are not only lists of questions in different languages, but also illustrations, so that the test-taker can understand the situation more easily. This means that the form in which information is presented in the task matters, as does the form in which information is represented in the student’s head. This gives rise to the model of Encodings.
The third factor is complexity. If the task is more complex than the student can solve, he will lose part of the data, and the answer will not come together. If the task is simple, but the student takes it to be complex, he will begin solving the wrong task, and the answer will also fail to come together. This gives rise to the model of Levels.
Therefore, we need to learn how to measure complexity, sensitivity to time, and sensitivity to different ways of representing information. This gives rise to three models: Warming-Up, Encodings, and Levels. Other factors are important too, but they come to the foreground much less often.
4. General And Differential Psychology
In addition to the models of Warming-Up, Encodings, and Levels, we also have a model of what happens to a task in the human psyche.
This model belongs to general psychology: how a human being solves tasks in general.
The three models - Warming-Up, Encodings, and Levels - belong to differential psychology: they describe how people differ from one another and why one person solves a task better than another.
At this point, one could stop. We have obtained a working scheme: a virtual world in which people, tasks, and communities meet in thought experiments, and three models that help predict these encounters: Warming-Up, Encodings, and Levels.