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The importance of stupidity in scientific research
- Vanit 4y agoThis is what really struck me when I tried some game dev in my free time. All that experience and intuition that makes me feel smart was missing. I imagine the feeling is significantly more intense when you're literally studying the unknown.
- seydor 4y agoStupidity is the wrong word, imperfection perhaps. All scientists must feel stupid , but there is a culture of polished, perfect research that is mostly fake, like all perfect things
- amelius 4y ago> 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. Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
- nathias 4y agobut that's not science, that's funding and bureaucracy
- sigmoid10 4y agoWelcome to modern academia.
- random_walker 4y agoDon't paint the whole field with single brush
- throwoutway 4y agoI’m afraid that it’s hard to see the true colors under the last two decades Of paint layers
- marginalia_nu 4y agoAcademia doesn't own the scientific process, though. Anyone can do science. Doesn't require special equipment or a government license.
- feet 4y agoAre you sure about that special equipment part? There are a ton of areas of research that require highly specialized and usually expensive equipment. There are sometimes people creating plans for open hardware but it is not the norm
- marginalia_nu 4y agoYou can't perform every scientific experiment yourself, but that also goes for academia. The vast majority of academic scientists don't have access to particle accelerators, can't send probes into space, and so on. Regardless of who you are, there are always going to be experiments that are inaccessible to you.
- PeterisP 4y agoYou do require time, though. If some study project requires a few person-years then it's simply not going to happen as someone's hobby, you need funding for that team. And in biology (which is the context of the original post) you often need uninterrupted time, as you can't pause a live experiment if you get busy in your day job, no matter if it's bacteria or mice. If we don't consider funding, we're effectively saying that science should be the domain of independently rich aristocrats living off of inherited wealth, as it often was a few centuries ago.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago> If we don't consider funding, we're effectively saying that science should be the domain of independently rich aristocrats living off of inherited wealth, as it often was a few centuries ago. Given the existing model has brought us to a point where there are several fields in which almost no published studies can be successfully replicated, at this point I'm not even sure that it would be a bad development to go back to having the likes of Gauss and Leibniz running the show. Dependency on external funding and the pressure of publish-or-perish seems incredibly destructive to meaningful scientific progress.
- BurningFrog 4y agoWhich also is distinct from science.
- rob_c 4y agoExcept for when an area of science does this well and sructures itself well, in which case all problems are academic. Academics are responsible for sorting out academic funding and likely always will be, pretending the 2 are separate creates problems such as is seen in biology (and yes, other sciences to an extent) where big funding from the private sector is forcing open publically funded research for the greater good toward lining the pockets of nouveau-industrialists.
- jltsiren 4y agoIgnoring the incentives is a key skill in science. And in all creative work in general. If you respond strongly to external incentives, you are unlikely to create anything truly novel, because you are doing what others are telling you to do. You may be good, and you may be successful, but your work is probably not as good as it could be.
- amelius 4y agoSounds like a recipe for getting fired.
- tomrod 4y agoCitation? I highly doubt these claims. /s
- Shugarl 4y agoBut you need money to research stuff. And the ones who gives you money are expecting a return on their investment.
- feet 4y agoWow maybe its a bad idea to think of research purely in investment terms. Like housing. Or health care. But I guess this is what decades of capitalistic thinking does to people
- XzAeRosho 4y agoIt's absolutely amazing to me that so many people find research-funding a crazy thing to do, almost equivalent to throwing money down the drain.
- iamcurious 4y agoLuckily those that respond strong to external incentives go straight to industry.
- pvaldes 4y agoNot even close. You do science often in the middle of a complex regulated system called university. Is a highly regulated, highly hierarchical environment and a faux pass can be the end of your career easily. You can safely ignore everybody, as long as you do it with your own money; or when you achieve the status of holy cow. Big mistake otherwise.
- ketanmaheshwari 4y agoPLUG but we are doing something about it by providing a platform to report negative results. www.error-workshop.org
- withinboredom 4y agoIf I were in science, I’d be that guy always trying to fail and destroy years of “fake science”.
- Topolomancer 4y agoNot related to the content, but does anyone else get a 403 error when using a smartphone with Chrome to visit the link? I have to explicitly check "desktop site" to get access here.
- physicsgraph 4y agoI'm using Chrome on Android and am getting the intended page (no error).
- bowsamic 4y agoI think the most intense part of feeling stupid is gotten over in the first couple of years of PhD. If you’ve gotten through that you’ve probably crossed a huge and insurmountable barrier between novice and expert. After that it’s not as bad bc you know you can do it again. For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
- logifail 4y ago> Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
- bowsamic 4y agoYeah it's really the luck of the draw when it comes to supervisors. Thankfully mine was very supportive both academically and psychologically, but most people aren't that lucky
- DrAwdeOccarim 4y agoThat is super lucky! I was fortunate they were super academically supportive, but psychologically? Terrible. Same with my post-doc advisor, though the rest of the lab members were really the academically supporting part of my post-doc; my advisor was just great at getting grant money and little else. Like a savant.
- teekert 4y agoI’m also a scientist. I very much agree with this, I even think you have an enormous advantage over colleagues who avoid feeling stupid! There is so much interesting stuff that makes you feel stupid. I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude. Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
- abirch 4y agoOne of my friends had a Nobel Laureate as a professor. The professor half-jokingly told everyone that getting a Nobel prize is easy, just disprove something that everyone accepts as accepted truth.
- JackFr 4y agoI like to remind myself, “That a problem can be simply stated is not a guarantee that it can be simply solved.”
- rob_c 4y agostupidity >biologists.com Need I mention the reproducibility crisis, poor funding models, retractions from front-page of nature within the single field... "Naivete" I can agree with. Stupidity is not and should _never_ be encouraged or endorsed. Even if common use of American English tends to push the meaning of the former onto the latter. Definitions of words are very important when communicating openly and honestly. This is not an attack on commonly used words in American language, it's an observation. British English (and I assume others) are following suit as America leads the way in "english-speaking" culture. Mixing word definitions is entering into a quasi-mixed up state where people don't know the exact definitions of words which makes difficult good-faith conversation difficult.
- throwoutway 4y agoPerhaps more scientists need to be self-aware and feel stupid, rather than cocksure confident & wrong. But the incentives in university, popsci, etc make that harder
- analog31 4y agoI think this is a common misconception, perhaps amplified by popsci and the media stoking outrage. Granted this is anecdata, but I belong to a family of scientists (myself, both parents, spouse, one sibling, his spouse), and live in a town where you can't spit without hitting a scientist. Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us! As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms. What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.
- radus 4y agoThe vast majority of scientists I know (I'm a scientist also) are self-doubting to a fault and often feel stupid even if they're not.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI began programming "late" in life (around age 30), and was initially confused at the number of programmers in their mid-30s who decide they are too old to program. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, while they expected to feel like they didn't know what they were doing when they began programming at age 15, they somewhere along the line expected to never feel that way again. Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year). If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
- worker_person 4y agoA lot of teenagers and below have zero humility. Arrogance can be useful to get you past the stage when you're terrible and don't realize it, to when you actually are good. My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers. Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days. I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI recall realizing that, when I looked at my past programming and was somewhat embarrassed, that was really a way of saying I had learned something significant since then. I suppose if you look at your own work from years before and see nothing you would do differently now, it must mean the opposite. Totally agree on the advantages of youthful arrogance (in this context).
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- LetThereBeLight 4y agoFunny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.
- tpoacher 4y agoThis is a very old article, one which I've come across many times. But every time I've enjoyed it as much as the first.
- YesThatTom2 4y agoMy father was a research chemist in industry. He had a framed sign in his office that read: “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called RESEARCH.”