Better Explanations Improve Our Lives: Why entrepreneurial university communities are some of the healthiest, most prosperous places on the planet

All advances in human well being have come from better explanations.?Scientists like to call better explanations “hypotheses”, but I prefer the simpler and more easily understood term “better explanation”.?An explanation is simply a description of how something works that agrees with the existing data and that is falsifiable. A better explanation is an explanation that somehow improves on prior explanations, perhaps by taking into account newly acquired data that challenged an old explanation.?A better explanation might also just be easier to understand by more people.?Science is the process of developing better explanations.?However, I don’t confine my statement that all advances in human well being come from better explanations to science.?Better explanations advance the arts, the humanities, government, and so forth.

Can you think of any improvements in human well being that have come about any other way??I can’t.?The phonetic alphabet, the printing press, the compass, the internal combustion engine, electricity, Shakespeare’s plays, antibiotics, building codes to withstand earthquakes, Renaissance art, a Jeffersonian democracy, all came from a better explanations of something, and all improved human well being (some also generated other problems, but that is another story).?

For better explanations to improve human well being, there are four elements: (1) explanation development; (2) explanation propagation; (3) explanation application; and (4) a culture of tolerance for the explanations to take hold.

Explanation development.?Someone or some-many has to develop the explanation.?I am the Associate Vice President for Research at an R1 university, so I naturally see this as “Research”.?However, companies, entrepreneurs (especially entrepreneurs), and others have often been the developers of great, new explanations.?Universities obviously play a key role here, but they aren’t the only developers of explanations that matter in 2016.?

Explanation propagation.?A better explanation, once developed, has to be propagated.?Education plays a key role here, but so does university tech transfer, patent development and licensing, and other tools that we use to disseminate our ideas and feed rewards to the developers.?The dual role of development and propagation of better explanations is why universities need to be heavily invested both in research and education.?Research without education is development of explanation without propagation.?Education without research is propagation of…. what?

Explanation application.?This is where business and, in some cases, government really come in to play.?Entrepreneurs, startups, and high-growth companies are some of the most important institutions for applying new explanations and delivering their benefits to so many people.?Government also plays a key role in applying explanations - for example, in helping us to apply our knowledge of soil erosion to prevent further damage to agricultural lands in early-to-mid 20th century America, or the development and enforcement of the Montreal protocol which is helping to reduce harm to the ozonosphere by eliminating CFC’s.?The importance of application to better explanations is one of the reasons that symbiosis of the entrepreneur-university ecosystem in startup communities can be so powerful.?

The last element is different - a culture of tolerance for better explanations.?A culture that tolerates new and better explanations is a culture where better explanations can improve human well being.?Not all cultures nor all times have been tolerant of new and better explanations.?In fact, most cultures and times have been intolerant of better explanations.?The reasons for this are complex, but David Deutsch explains it well in his excellent book, “The Beginning of Infinity” that most new explanations are bad - i.e., they may be worse than the existing explanation.?In the same way that most genetic mutations are bad - they harm the organism - most new explanations or ideas will turn out to have major errors.?A society living on the edge of viability, such as most human societies for most of human history, most new explanations posed existential threats to those societies.?As a consequence, the safest way to maintain stability and some measure of viability was for societies to be very conservative about new ideas and to reject nearly all new ideas, whether bad or better.?However, something unique happened in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe - those societies began to be more tolerant of new explanations. That tolerance, at various levels, imperfectly and in fits and starts, has continued and spread up to the present day.?Other societies had had periods of tolerance, but until Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe, the tolerance had not lasted long enough to become what today appears irreversible (time will ultimately tell).

It is no accident that some of the most successful, prosperous communities on the planet today are symbiotic “ecosystems” containing one or more teaching and research universities embedded in a tolerant community of entrepreneurs. These communities, which may encompass entire states or regions, contain the key elements that improve human well being.