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