Sunday, March 1, 2009

The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research



Martin A. Schwartz: The importance of stupidity in scientific research.

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.

For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.

That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.

I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

5 comments:

  1. I think this speaks to one of the most profound truths of all.

    Socrates himself is thought to have said "I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing."

    I enjoy reading your blog and I think your point of view is worth expressing.

    Thank you.

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  2. Sinner,

    Welcome. I agree 100%

    Glad you enjoy it.

    Regards...=)

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  3. COMFORT & CONFIDENCE LEAD TO SCIENTIFIC STAGNATION.

    This paper bings up an important point: People (scientists are people, too, you know) want to be comfortable & confident.

    As a result of this human emotional need, people cling to the familiar. This website has chronicled this reality in the scientfic community. First, it was in the area of oil geology, more broadly, hydrocarbon geophysics.

    While the scientific evidence and in situ observations & measurements clearly support the Abiotic Oil theory of hydrocarbon formation in the Earth's crust, that hardly seems to matter to oil geologists (at least publically).

    Second, it was, again, in the area of geology, this time in the study of the movements of the Earth's crust. The vast majority of geologists hold to the Subduction, Continental Drift theory, even though the scientific evidence is scanty for subduction and wholesale continental drift. A scanty amount of evidence has been repeated and reverberated as in an echo chamber until the deceptive appearance of a substantial body of scientific evidence has been created.

    In another chamber, a vast collection of scientific evidence resides, standing forlornly, too full to permit useless echoing that supports the proposition that Earth is expanding.

    And finally, astronomers stand over their mathematical equations amplifying an all-encompassing theory of gravity that increasingly leads them to dream up objects, phenomenon, and energies that have never been observed & measured in an endless effort to preserve and ratify the all-encompassing theory.

    Without all these unobserved exotics the gravity "only" model is falsified.

    So dream on, they do.

    Meanwhile, right, here, on Earth, in plasma physics laboratories and aboard scientific satellites sent into space to make in situ measurements, electromagnetism is constantly being observed & measured, yet, most astronomers seem blithly unaware or incurious.

    What do these three situations have in common?

    A large body of scientists are satisfied with a sense of comfort and confidence, giving them a false sense of security which leads to scientific stagnation.

    The scientists ignore the humble sense of uncertainty tugging at their sleeve, which, if confronted, would eventually lead to further discoveries.

    How much faster would science progress if only scientists of all stripes would give up their comfort and confidence and face the vast body of scientific evidence available for their consideration if only they would let go of their blankets?

    It's a question that desperately needs to be answered.

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  4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmXp65Ky3hw&feature=sdig&et=1235911304.32

    Enjoy

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  5. I think that perfection is the important element in science. Wherever a wrong answer is stated, it bugs the crap out of me until it gets resolved. I'm no grad student or anything, more of a self taught hydrologic tech.

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