I took Dr.Bracks permission to share a very interesting essay I came across last week.My only contribution to it here is just to copy and paste the story! :-)
I really recommend anyone who is interested in scientific research and planning on spending the rest 30-50 years doing science to read it.
When I first joined a research group, my professeur - more like my godfather- gave me a valuable piece of advice.He told me that whatever I do in life should bring about happiness.I should be happy doing it and I should be able to make others happy too.If you find yourself not waking up with a smile on your face everyday- well, most days of the week!lol- then something is seriously wrong.
Ok!Just read the essay, I am getting a diarrhea of words again!
Cheers!
doi: 10.1242/jcs.033340 June 1, 2008 J Cell Sci 121, 1771.
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.
- Accepted April 9, 2008.
- © The Company of Biologists Limited 2008
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ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this post, Martin! This article does gives good advice, and it kind of resonated with me. It's good to remember that I can "bumble along", get unexpected results, and even completely muck up experiments, and still feel OK about myself as a scientist since I'm learning from the mistakes. In the MD/PhD program, I spent 2 years in medical school, where the environment was very focused on correct answers on tests. I think it would have been helpful to read this before starting graduate school!
ReplyDeleteOne thing I don't entirely agree with is the statement "...doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty." Arguably, "intrinsic difficulty" can't be changed, but I think policies can certainly impact the stress those difficulties place on scientists and our ability to deal with them. Funding is very competitive, and research in biomedical sciences is very expensive. This means you can't bumble too much, or you will be out of a job, so scientists often hedge against their own stupidity. This includes sticking to research that is low-risk, and the dubious practice of including in grant applications proposals for experiments that have actually already been completed. One concrete way that institutional change could make it easier for scientists to accept their stupidity is for journals to accept more negative data for publications (we were wrong, avocados do not actually prevent baldness...)
An article with some related thoughts (and several Lewis Carroll references): "Six Impossible Things" by DR Green. It's free access at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20965414
The author seemed to be extremely depressed when he wrote this paper.
ReplyDeleteI found the science as a world of locked doors, and the researchers are trying to find the suitable keys for each one to release the suffering patients on behind to the freedom healthy world. That could be enough to hold in the scientific research stupidity.
Thanks for sharing this article Salwa. Like Mike, I agree that research and medical school are two very different beasts.
ReplyDeleteIn medicine you learn different signs and symptoms and what disease/condition they correspond too. Then you learn how to earn the trust of a patient in order to obtain true symptoms, which will often fit the bill of a specific diagnosis. Sometimes you may have to go down to the second or third diagnosis on your differential. However, at each step if treatment fails, there are other therapies or another diagnosis that may fit. And if there is no treatment for the condition, you treat the symptoms. If there is no defined diagnosis, you write up a case study and publish it.
In research, there are references and experts, but when you pursue a PhD, thats when these resources will fail. In my opinion (which is shaped by few facts but primarily opinions of others and my own ideals), a Doctor of Philosophy uses their mind to shed light on truths that are yet unknown to humanity. Wikipedia defines philosophy as "the study of general and fundamental problems..." and credits it with being "...critical, generally systematic approach..." with a "reliance on rational argument." This brings me to my disagreement with Martin A Shwartz; I don't feel stupid. Maybe I am doing it wrong, maybe I have the wrong definition of "stupid." But I don't feel stupid. I believe there is an intrinsic truth that is undeniable, for whatever you study as PhD student, or in life. This absolute truth exists. Revealing this truth for the rest of humanity, contributing to the body of human knowledge, is your goal in research. Frustration is to be expected, but frustration should not be confused with the feeling of stupidity or a lack of intelligence. As long as the researcher is critical, systematic, and relies on a rationale, a hypothesis can be derived and tested. Hypotheses are often wrong, but being wrong should push our imaginations further. Why was the hypothesis wrong? What else may be involved? Is there a different approach I can use? I believe there are many situations that can lead to successful science. However, I cannot (at this naive stage in my career) measure scientific success as the number of articles published or grants awarded. Instead I see scientific success as making a significant contribution to the body of scientific knowledge, uncovering a truth that may one day become common knowledge, and thus pushing the envelope of human knowledge.
Rahul, I agree wit you here. Although, as I interpreted it, the article didn't really mean "stupid" in the usual sense of low intelligence. I interpreted it as ignorance. As you described, a good researcher is "critical, systematic, and relies on a rationale, a hypothesis that can be derived and tested." However, if that researcher is doing something interesting and pushing boundaries of what is known, by neccessity they will have a lot of ignorance towards what the "truth" really is and how to get to it.
ReplyDelete