Year of Discovery (Week 34: Moving from Conceptual to Practice and Hype in the Social Sciences)

This week, I spent a lot of time in metaphorical rabbit holes and discovery calls, while continuing to furnish my new home. I found tons of energy coaching and supporting entrepreneurs in various sectors, exploring new opportunities, and planning the upcoming holidays and my time in Chicago from January to March 2022.

What’s on my mind is that from next Wednesday afternoon, I’ll be partaking in a 10-day silent meditation. With no access to technology, books, journals, and exercise, I’ll be sitting in emptiness to explore my mind and the truths of humanity and suffering. Needless to say, I’m feeling nervous and intrigued. Despite my Buddhist upbringing, I’ve never been in complete silence for 10 days and I’m curious about what emerges.

Today, I’m sharing reflections on moving from conceptual to practice and hype in the social sciences.

Conceptual to Practice

One of my weekly practices that continues to be the most grounding for me is the dharma talks and meditations that I attend. This week, the monk shared about the journey to attain enlightenment and it struck me as a lesson on how adults learn.

Almost all of us have a gap between who we are and who we want to become. Closing that gap often means shedding our understanding of what learning attainment looks like from our schooling days and allowing for patient practice. In school, when we learn about new concepts, we are tested and graded — so there is a clear way to understand how much knowledge we have gained. But the hardest part that requires patient practice is shifting the knowledge from conceptual to practice (beyond the test). Even harder is shifting wisdom (and new beliefs) from conceptual to practice.

As I learn more deeply about Buddhist wisdom, I’m realizing that in practice (like in adult learning), I need to embrace repetition, concentration, and joy.

Repetition: At the beginning of attending the dharma talks, my natural instinct craved a linear growth path where I could learn one concept and could move on to the next. My frustration on the repeated wisdom week after week turned into appreciation when I realized that the repetition helped me build my conviction in my practice. The monk said that oftentimes with wisdom, we can hear it many times and know it conceptually, but it may take years for it to become truly inane and lived.

Concentration: This is important in Buddhism both in and out of the meditation practice. Out of the meditation practice, concentration is fostered through moral discipline, which means letting go of things that generate our anger, frustration, jealousy, competitiveness. It also means keeping inside all the things that maintain our positive qualities. Moral discipline is how we control our minds in daily life. That allows for a stronger concentration in the meditation practice, where we control our mental excitement (when our mind wanders to an object of attachment) and mental sinking (when we forget the object of meditation).

Joy: This has been one of the hardest practices for me. Without a joyful determination in my practice, I find my mind moving towards mental sinking, focusing on the negative. Without joy, I make the practice more about me and my progress, over gaining broader wisdom of the world and a pathway to alleviating suffering for more people.

What parts of learning are you unlearning as an adult?

Hype in the Social Sciences

Recently, I’ve been exploring ways to enable more evidence-backed innovations to grow in the human-flourishing space (mental health, adult learning, social and emotional learning, etc). Within that, a hypothesis emerged: if we are able to bring social scientists and research psychologists closer together with entrepreneurs and builders, we could spurn more much-needed consumer-facing innovations in the human-flourishing space.

As I dug more into the social sciences, I found this article — ‘Research Findings That are Probably Wrong Cited Far More Than Robust Ones, Study Finds’ — which shares that:

• Scientific research findings that are probably wrong gain far more attention than robust results, according to academics who suspect that the bar for publication may be lower for papers with grabbier conclusions.
• Studies in top science, psychology and economics journals that fail to hold up when others repeat them are cited, on average, more than 100 times as often in follow-up papers than work that stands the test of time.
• Three major projects have found replication rates as low as 39% in psychology journals, 61% in economics journals, and 62% in social science studies published in Nature and Science, two of the most prestigious journals in the world.

Apparently, many of the famous studies we’ve come to know apparently are hard to replicate. These include:

• Power posing will make you act bolder (apparently there were only 42 participants in the study cited over 450 times)
• Smiling will make you feel happier
• Self-control is a limited resource
• Babies are born with the power to imitate

When I reached out to a friend in research and academia to ask him about his thoughts on this article, he confirmed, “Any sexy-sounding finding from 2000–2010 in psychology, you should basically just ignore”.

The fuse for confronting non-replicable social science research was lit by statistician John Ioannidis in 2005 in a review that outlined why over half of all published research in social and medical sciences might be invalid. These are thanks to what is now termed “questionable research practices”.

For me, that was astounding. I had thought that hype was more or less reserved for the venture capital and startup space, and hadn’t realized the extent to which it impacted other types of work, especially ones that I believed were held to a certain level of rigor. While I take these findings forward to think more about how to contribute to the human flourishing space, I’m left to wonder:

• What does it take to truly create high-quality science? A few thoughts here and here.
• What does it say about our world that researchers and academics (the creators of knowledge) may feel pressured to release ‘sexy’ data about our world without a certain level of rigor? What does it say about our values?
• Why does progress always signify change and newness, rather than an acceptance of the quality of existing knowledge and ways?

What I Listened to This Week: The Future of Hope