Can We Have Science Sans Ego? | Richard Schaden

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Transcript

Question: What’s your understanding of the issue of today’s lack of scientific transparency?

Richard Schaden: Well, ego is a big issue because people like to be connected with what they’ve created. Money, obviously making money and having power is a very important thing tied to ego and certainly gets in the way of sharing and people being willing to release their ideas. I think that for me, it’s very possible to create a safe place for young people with good ideas. It’s a matter of trust, it’s a matter of people trusting each other and having no fear that they’re going to be taken advantage of, or being hurt from either an ego standpoint, or a financial standpoint.

I think you have to do it by raising the level of consciousness of people, particularly in the scientific world to a point where they really believe that we have to improve our culture. We have to get unstuck from where we are. I don’t have much trouble communicating with scientists on that level; to me it is very similar to communicating with juries. Personally, I don’t have a lot of trouble with that, I think that I’ve been able to make a few young engineers feel very safe to disclose their information to me and trust me with it. What I’m trying to develop is a system of what you call, mature scientists and expansive thinkers that can do that – that can make a safe place for people to share ideas. And that’s the work in progress, that’s were we are evolving.

Question: What stakeholders could help advance this shift in the scientific community?

Richard Schaden: Every day I meet more new ones. I think that in the last month or so, I’ve met some that I – some whose name I can give freely like Peter Diamandis, I think he is great along these lines. He was a great find for me. I think that some people, in terms of helping expand the level of consciousness, people like Andrew Cohen from Enlightenment Next, I think that kind of teaching will help tremendously to expand people so that they will work for the good of their culture as compared to the egocentric kind of inventors that we have really had historically. So, every day I am meeting more people that I think will make this inner circle work. And I’ve met several people whose names I wouldn’t feel real freely to give right now because I don’t think they would feel safe. But I think they will very shortly.

Recorded on January 25, 2010