The soup we are cooked in

I am still spending a fair amount of time reading, listening, and thinking about various forms of therapy (very generally interpreted as practices/approaches to help us understand and be at peace with our own minds — including things like mindfulness practices, meditation, somatic experiencing, psychotherapy, etc.). The time provides intellectual pleasure and of course has obvious benefits for my life more broadly – and for the lives of those around me (particularly my kids!). As I’ve expressed before, there’s a fairly constant series of collisions between that “work” and my thoughts about how we humans “do science.” Processing the collisions continues to help me understand and put words to my longterm discomfort with the attractive cloak I see us often laying over an inherently messy process of science.

How do we end up in the habits of mind and relationships with others that we do? How do we end up in the scientific habits of mind and places within scientific institutions that we do? I love the phrase used by Brad Reedy (in his book The Audacity to Be You and podcasts): the soup we are cooked in. The soup metaphor conveys something deeper and more complex than usual about how our experiences simmer and seep into what feels like our inherent way of being in the world – the amalgamation of all that now just feels like us. The metaphor is not of an external environment passively leaking into an organism or the process sprinkling on spices, but instead one of being rolled around and softened at a boil, and then simmered for long periods of time with ingredients that quickly become unrecognizable alone. Flavors from all the ingredients seep into each other. It’s impossible to recognize a carrot as it was before it went into the soup — it is now part of the soup and the essence of that soup in that carrot, and the carrot in the soup, cannot be erased. The many flavors cannot be separated, everything in the pot becomes part of everything else in the pot — even if something is removed.

We are all humans who were cooked in a unique soup – and most of us can see that on a personal level, even if we haven’t spent a lot time reflecting on the processes contributing to our own soup. If we think ours was a simple recipe of common ingredients, we are likely very wrong. We can see it on a personal level, but are we able to see it in our roles as scientists? (I am assuming you have some scientist-like role even if you don’t identify as a scientist professionally – we are all consumers of science on a daily basis). In my experience, I see very little awareness of the science-related soup we are cooked in among scientists, and even less reflection or deep curiosity around it. It feels like even admitting there is a soup that scientists are cooked in feels a little unscientific — according to the soup we were cooked in, that is. The soup-related work has largely been handed over philosophers of science to do from the outside (who were also cooked in an academic soup), rather than taken on by the practicing scientists themselves. Some might refer to the science soup as a Kuhn-like “paradigm” – and while that fits to a degree, I am trying to get at something deeper that includes the uncomfortable fact that we cannot separate our personal soups from our scientist soups. There are so many aspects of culture and values that I don’t think are often considered part of a “scientific paradigm,” not to mention an individual’s way of interacting with the world (both human and other).

Looking at the soup we’re cooked in is a natural part of personal therapy. Many of us have had the experience of how hard it can be to actually gain enough perspective, and courage, to put a ladle deep into the soup, stir it around, and sip a little at a time to try to understand why it looks and tastes the way it does. It’s a process of starting to understand, as much as possible, why we might keep doing the same things over and over again — without much awareness of doing them. It is a process of questioning our motivations and our reactions, interrogating all the implicit and explicit assumptions underlying how we live and interact with others, and letting go of being “right.” It’s a serious blow to the ego – and that’s really the point. And this leads me back to science.

Doing science still has a too-good-to-be-true vibe. The soup is served with fancy garnishes, but there is a fear of peering under the lid of the pot. It might upset too much of the status-quo and the way of doing business. There is a fear it might inadvertently contribute to mis-trust of science. It might expose limitations based on a culture of narratives and beliefs that are rarely questioned by individuals. This is ironic when the scientist stereotype is portrayed to value questioning and healthy skepticism — as long as the ladle doesn’t dip too far below the surface of the soup. I believe a deeper stir and curiosity would be a good thing for science, even if uncomfortable and even if it means giving up a little of the scientist-as-hero narrative that’s been added in large doses to the soup.

There are the obvious ingredients in our personal soups that don’t take much work to be aware of (e.g. exposure to religion as children); though being aware of an ingredient does not mean it is translated into questioning or interrogating or thinking about it as an ingredient in a complex soup. But I’m more interested in the very subtle parts of the process – the mild spices, the temperature, the type of pot, the length of time it simmers, when different ingredients are entered, how often it is stirred, etc. — things that are not obvious to become aware of, but can drastically change the nature of the soup. All those things that make up our experience, but that we rarely give attention to – most likely because we aren’t aware of them. Why do we do what we do? Why do we interact with the world as we do?

Back to science. What is different about doing science? Why do you do science how you do science? Where did your beliefs about how to do science come from? We usually are aware of obvious things, like the program within which we received formal education, our advisors, and other mentors. This feels like the same level as the religion of our parents – we see that part of the soup, even if it’s its effects are not questioned deeply. But again, I’m more interested in the subtler parts of the scientific soup. Things like valuing objectivity, believing in a materialistic truth that is discoverable, believing a scientist can overcome human biases, valuing the peer-review process, beliefs and habits about how to carry out statistical inference, valuing RCTs over experiences, etc. And even just within Statistics, the soup and its process are hardly recognized – instead presented as a garnished meal in an attractive bowl to satisfy almost anyone and keep them from thinking about how to make their own meal. But, what are the ingredients when you look deeper? Where did they come from? Who cooked the original soup and why did they? Who kept it simmering on the stove? Who adds new ingredients and who prefers the original recipe? I could go on.

It’s easy to think we don’t start getting cooked as scientists as college or graduate school, but the science culture is part of American culture. It definitely starts early — probably preschool for a lot of kids who end up becoming professional scientists, or even earlier from the their parents. It has been hard for me as a parent to watch what comes home from school about how to “do science” – and definitely anything related to statistical inference. For example, at an early age we teach kids to form and latch on to hypotheses with all our might — and judge the success of an experiment (even if implicitly) by whether they “proved” or “disproved” their hypothesis. I spent most of my comments volunteering at science fairs just encouraging kids that their projects weren’t a failure if they didn’t find support for their hypothesis. I advocated for adding “limitations” sections to poster boards.

It can take an enormous amount of painful work to make sense of how the soup we were cooked in affects our lives and the lives of those who interact with us. It makes sense that few people do it. Many days I would like to go back to being blissfully unaware of the soup. What would the practice of Science look like if scientists were more willing to really look at the scientific culture soup they, and their scientific ancestors, were cooked in? It would be painful, but could it help lead to a more creative, fulfilling, unencumbered process of discovery? I think so. A kind of science therapy, or maybe therapy science — though both of those phrases could easily be misinterpreted to imply our current scientific soup applied to therapy. All these words are just expressing what I see as a need to look deeply at our practices, beliefs, and assumptions, where they might have come from, figuring out what’s worth holding onto and what’s worth letting go of. I see a shift to not just accepting what has been handed down and what constitutes “rigor” and “success” – and really all those ingredients that have been tossed into the soup and stirred to the point they’re not recognizable as individual ingredients anymore.

What’s in the soup matters, but what matters more is to recognize that we are not separate from a soup. No one is without a soup. It is frustrating to hear people talk as if science-related work that is separate from a messy soup. The scientist-as-hero narrative is, to me, portraying scientists as if they weren’t cooked in a complex soup, both personally and professionally (as if we can separate those).

Here’s to recognizing there is a soup, and you would be interacting with your environment differently had the soup you were cooked in been different — and that includes the ways we do and consume science.