Random Scientific Papers - The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research

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Other posts of the series here:
1 - Evidence for a limit to human lifespan

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Hey there

Today I bring you a new paper that is The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research.
Sounds crazy right? We never thought of researchers as stupid people, we imagine them as very smart. Maybe, according to the author, researchers must learn how to be productively stupid, putting themselves in the awkward position of being ignorant. And that causes a big difference in the outcome of results.

This paper starts with the author meeting an old friend. They were both Ph.D. students. As the conversation progresses, the author is in shock when the friend told him that she left graduate school because the work made her feel stupid and she didn't want to feel stupid every day. The author had thought of her as one of the brightest people he knew and couldn't possibly imagine why she did that.

The author kept thinking about it and in the next day it hit him like thunder:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid.

The author suggests as well that it's supposed to be this way.

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 and had a fascination with understanding the physical world, as well an emotional need to discover new things.
But in 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 the author, it was a daunting task:

• What questions that would lead to significant discoveries?
• How to draw entirely convincing experiments?
• How to foresee difficulties and see ways around them?

The author's research was somewhat interdisciplinary and he pestered the faculty in his department, who were experts in the various disciplines that he needed.
One day he went to Henry Taube, Nobel Prize winner and Taube told him that he didn't know how to solve the problem.

Well, if Taube didn't have the answer, nobody did.
And that's the beauty of the thought: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being his research problem, it was up to him to solve:

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.

Basically, students aren't made to understand how hard it is to do research, because research is the 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.

The author even suggests that is important to teach students how to be productively stupid. This means that if we don’t feel stupid, we’re not really trying:

Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’.

No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.
The difficult part is to ease the transition from learning what other people once discovered to making our 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:

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.

Here is the video:

References:
Martin A. Schwartz. The importance of stupidity in scientific research, Journal of Cell Science, 2008, 1771-1771, DOI: 10.1242/jcs.033340

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Legman