Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Martin A. Schwartz wrote a thought-provoking essay on how scientific research makes us feel "stupid" and why that's perfectly OK. He shares an anecdote from his days as a PhD student, in which he came across a question that no one could give him the answer to. "That's when it hit me," he writes. "That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve... 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."That is a foundational idea in scientific research. As Schwartz puts it, "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." The scientific process (ask a question, form a hypothesis, test your hypothesis, and draw conclusions) is being "stupid" in a productive way. "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... 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."
In summary: going through the scientific process = productive stupidity. Or, as in the titular quote of this post, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That wonderful gem is from Irish writer and Nobel prizewinner Samuel Beckett, who clearly understood that we learn best by trial and error; whether or not we ever reach our original goal is relatively unimportant, as long as we clear up some of our stupidity along the way.
Read Schwartz's full essay: "The importance of stupidity in scientific research"
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Labels: engineering, philosophy, ponderings, science
posted by the alygator @ 10:33 AM
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