The Saturday Exhale Episode 10: On The Wellness Science Olympiad and ‘Thinking For Oneself’

VG: On Nov 5-8th, in Palm Beach, Florida, Molecular Hydrogen Institute will be organizing the Wellness Science Olympiad, hosted by the Eudēmonia Summit. Can you talk a little bit about the Olympiad, what it entails and how the idea for it came about, and why it complements and extends Eudēmonia’s mission of being a gathering dedicated to the pursuit of human flourishing?

AT: My one company, InhaleH₂, is exhibiting at the Eudēmonia Summit. As I spoke to the team, learning their ethos, I started thinking more about truth through friction, but also collaboration. I started thinking about how most good people on all sides of the health debate, or any debate really, want the same thing: to live a better life, and for others to be able to, also.

I began thinking about the problems we face: overcoming bad actors willing to lie and scam to sell a product, dismiss “enemies,” or grow a following. This exists on all sides of the debate. I started pondering how to solve it, and it came back to the tenets of StressHacked and The Stone Wall. We can’t achieve these goals unless we have the strength and capacity to attempt them. So, how do we raise others up to help achieve these goals? How do we earn the trust of the well-intentioned public, while convincing them to hold the bad actors accountable? The only answer is by improving their capacity, in this case specifically through improved knowledge, and training on how to think.

So, I contacted my friend Dr. Tyler LeBaron from the Molecular Hydrogen Institute, and pitched him the concept. He loved it. I then spoke to the Eudēmonia team, and they were intrigued. I further spoke to my friends Cole and Gary Brecka from H2Tab, who agreed to help me sponsor the prizes. After some more conversations with various academics, figuring out legalities, budget, and more, the MHI announced they will be launching the Wellness Science Initiative—including Challenges with ranking events, free educational materials, and the goal of community involvement in improving critical thinking and understanding of the scientific method, while also announcing the inaugural Wellness Science Olympiad to be held at the Eudēmonia Summit in West Palm Beach, FL, this coming November.

At the Olympiad, contestants will compete on exams based on critical thinking, knowledge of the scientific method, basic facts about our physiology, and the purported mechanisms of how various lifestyle interventions may work to improve human health: from cold exposure, heat, fasting, red light, to molecular hydrogen. No product endorsements, no claims, just teaching people how to think, and rewarding those that excel with substantial prizes. We are working on gaining more sponsors, as we hope that there will be a budget for prizes for others, just for entering and improving, also. We want community involvement, we want everyone to participate. We want to ensure that we grow together, so that we can work together towards eudemonia, towards a life of flourishing, a life well lived.

VG: This Wellness Science Olympiad sounds like an excellent event and a ‘beloved’ idea, to paraphrase Arthur Schopenhauer. I like this notion of “teaching people how to think.” Because critical thinking is not easy, it takes practice, and it’s a hormetic struggle—basically. To quote Schopenhauer directly, from his essay “On Thinking For Oneself”:

“Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over. For only by universally combining what we know, by comparing every truth with every other, do we fully assimilate our own knowledge and get it into our power. We can think over only what we know, and so we should learn something; but we know only what we have thought out…. We can divide thinkers into those who think primarily for themselves and those who think at once for others. The former are the genuine self-thinkers in the double meaning of the term; they are the real philosophers. For they alone take the matter seriously; and the pleasure and happiness of their existence consists in just thinking. The others are the sophists; they wish to shine and seek their fortune in what they hope to obtain from others in this way; this is where they are in earnest.”

I think you recognize, as Schopenhauer does in this essay, that “mere experience is as little able to replace thinking as is reading. Pure empiricism is related to thinking as eating to digestion and assimilation. When empiricism boasts that it alone through its discoveries has advanced human knowledge, it is as if the mouth were to boast that the existence of the body were solely its work.” It seems to me that, in this Olympiad, you are offering an experience in hermeneutic discretion, and this is the kind of skill that may not only help someone live “a life of flourishing, a life well lived,” but may actually save a life.

AT: 100%; we have to understand precisely what empiricism is, what it means, when it is applicable, and where the shortcomings are. Otherwise, we are just blindly following, memorizing without thinking. I selfishly want to be surrounded by others who know how to think. I believe, and they may contend, that others should selfishly want to know how to think. Only those benefitting from the ignorance and gullibility of others who do not know how to think, nor have been trained on agreed empirical premises not currently in dispute, would argue against a society of more thinkers, more thought.

So, without presupposing a definitive morality, I will say that all who want a society that is more grounded in truth, seeking to work towards human flourishing, should embrace, support, and if they are able, promote in some capacity this endeavor, this Olympiad. Indifference can be excused in those who may not see the immediate benefit for themselves, but active resistance, dismissal, or disparagement needs to be recognized for what it is: fear from a predator relying on an unthinking populace.