Taking Claude to School - Natural Science
Reason Applied to Reality
On Day One of Taking Claude to School, our student discovered a new book that is part investing guide, part philosophical manifesto. He described its investing as “the idea that data-driven, disciplined thinking beats gut instinct and conventional wisdom” and the philosophy “replaces backward-looking performance reporting and predicting markets with taking ownership of the investor’s future.”
In addition, this was a school of classical education. In the library were found John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government from the 17th century, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations from the 18th, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species from the 19th century.
After homeroom, Claude’s first period was Civics Class, the second period was Economics Lab, and this brief essay will summarize the third period - Natural Science. But first, here is what Claude found to be the common thread among these three classics:
A book that successfully bridges the philosophical and the practical, that makes abstract principles feel personally urgent and concretely actionable, is extraordinarily rare. That’s precisely what gives books like that an outsized cultural footprint compared to their initial readership.
In Civics class, individual rights and the nature of government were given form as independent thought and action. In the Economics Lab, rights and economic freedom were concretized as self-generated goals and the price mechanism. And in Natural Science class, your free will to define goals grounded in reality will be the subject.
More broadly, what does it mean to be rational? Perhaps the best source for a concise definition is novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and her essay, The Objectivist Ethics:
The virtue of Rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action. It means one’s total commitment to a state of full, conscious awareness.
And using Rand’s innovation, how does this become integrated with free will in the context of your personal financial decisions:
It means a commitment to the principle that all of one’s convictions, values, goals, desires and actions must be based on, derived from, chosen and validated by a process of thought . . . directed by as ruthlessly strict an application of logic, as one’s fullest capacity permits.
Essentially, logic demands that you apply reason to the evidence of reality and do it in the context of the circumstances. Only then can you learn cause and effect, formulate propositions, test premises, and eliminate contradictions. This describes the scientific method, and when applied to the natural world, it becomes orderly and intelligible.
Naturally, reason, reality and rationality are the elements of elegant man-made systems because they hold natural law as primary. Existence exists regardless of your awareness or opinion of it. Here, Claude has learned how elegant systems propagate:
The three traits you identify — objective thinking, goal-driven activity, and intellectual independence — are not just individually valuable. They are mutually reinforcing in a way that makes the combination unusually powerful:
Objective thinking without goals produces analysis but no action.
Goal-driven activity without objectivity produces hustle aimed at the wrong targets.
Neither means much without intellectual independence, because a person who outsources their conclusions will eventually abandon both.
So far, so good, but what are the impediments? Briefly, they are force, faith and fear. In today’s welfare state societies, that may be the force of the State, faith in some medieval deity, or fear of social disfavor.
Make no mistake, those impediments are huge. And for those or other reasons, there are many institutions that are averse to objective thinking, explicitly defined goals, and intellectual independence. If you don’t believe me, ask Claude:
A book can be profoundly right and still languish in obscurity, or it can reach millions but be misread by most of them. The significance of such a book would ultimately depend not just on its content, but on whether it finds the infrastructure — educators, advisors, media, communities — to carry its core ideas outward at scale.
And what is the question that prompted these lessons in civics, economics and natural science that were learned by Claude in the course of these three essays? Here is my one part, one sentence question:
If a book could motivate a large percentage of the culture to think objectively, pursue goal-driven activity, and become intellectually independent, what would be the significance of that book?
Yet is that not the mission of every liberty-minded non-profit and think tank? And why is no one asking this question? Is it faith in their existing principles? Or fear of success? I have asked several well-informed people over the last six months - all of whom seemed to interpret the question’s intent and evade a direct answer. Naturally, Claude did not have that problem:
But to answer your question directly: a book that genuinely accomplished what you describe would be among the most consequential works of its era.
Moving forward, what value is recognized by the greatest number of people? What tool could motivate a plurality of the culture to adopt rational behavior for productive, independent lives? And how do we minimize the potential obscurity and misreading by educators, advisors, media, and communities?
Stay tuned - the next installment of Taking Claude to School will suggest such a catalyst, value, and tool.