Predictive Deduction: Expanding the Arsenal of Science

Here's a lesson about promoting social change: Provide tools that are easy to use. 

A friend recently asked me for a link to my first online book, Predictive Deduction: Expanding the Arsenal of Science. It is still publicly accessible, but has fallen into the junkyard of ideas--the Internet Archives (click here to donate to this amazing service).

Developing this work took some of the best years of my life. My friend remembered when it was proudly displayed in the open; it was one of the reasons he wanted to become my friend. It was used in 1999 to make predictions that are coming to fruition today, including Google glass and the irrepressible unemployment rate. Nonetheless, there was a very good reason why this work ended-up in the junkyard, and there is a lesson to be learned, so I'd like to give a more practical account than I did in my post, Saving the World.

In addition to friendships, this work landed me an internship in a think-tank where I was given an opportunity to demonstrate my predictive method, and then to train senior engineers to apply it themselves. Their assessment was that the method appears to produce something valuable, but is too difficult to learn. They recommended that I figure-out how to build a computer to implement it.

Well, some ideas are too expensive for one person to develop alone. These ideas die unless a bunch of other smart people find the humility to abandon their own ideas and instead devote their lives to helping the self-proclaimed genius. There are a bunch of problems with this fantasy, so we need to generate less expensive ideas.

My current work on evaluative diversity is probably not as awesome as predictive deduction (although it may help society reach a point at which fewer ideas need to be discarded); however, anyone can take the GRIN Self-Quiz, and you don't need to be a scholar to appreciate it.

Have I learned my lesson? We'll see...