Examined life … and scientific practice

I happen to be reading James Hollis’ Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey. And, as seems to happen often, I can’t help but see the connections between his descriptions and how I view the way statistical methods are often used in science today. Of course there is no real separation between how we live life and how we do science, even if much of society finds comfort in pretending there is. For myself, and especially for those areas where I have no direct connection to the science, there is a sneaky feeling of wishing that we could separate doing science from all our human challenges; a wish that we could really hang on the “objective” and the “seeking truth” from an unbiased place. We can try for such ideal, but I think to keep it from being dangerous, the impossibility (in most cases) of achieving the ideal also needs to be acknowledged. We give too much authority to automatic methods and precise-looking numbers without examining the why. In my experience, there just isn’t a sense of urgency instilled for the need to examine one’s own practices and current paradigms — just as for many of us, there doesn’t seem to be a need to examine life in a different way — until there is. It’s too bad we often need to a crisis to hit home to get us there.

Here are a few quotes from the first couple of chapters that sent a little bolt of my thought toward common statistical practices in science today:

I am not in any way suggesting that our cultural values, our religious traditions, our communal practices are wrong; that is not for me to judge. Many of those values link us with community, give us a sense of belonging and guidance in the flood of choices that beset us daily. I am saying, however, that the historic powers of such expectations, admonitions, and prohibitions are to be rendered conscious, considered thoughtfully, and tested by the reality of our life experience and inner prompting. No longer does received authority — no matter how ratified by history, sanctioned by tradition — automatically govern. We are rather called to a discernment process.

James Hollis, page 3 of Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey, 2018, Sounds True, Inc.

In any moment, we view the world through a distorting lens and make choices based on what the lens allows us to see, not what lies outside its frame.

James Hollis, page 3 of Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey, 2018, Sounds True, Inc.

Tiny in a world of giants, we reason that surely the world is governed by those who know, who understand, who are in control. How disconcerting it is then when we find our own psyches in revolt at these once protective adaptations, and how disillusioning it is to realize that there are very few, if any, adults on the scene who have a clue what is going on.

James Hollis, page 5 of Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey, 2018, Sounds True, Inc.