from Hacker News

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

by physicsgraph on 7/4/22, 3:14 PM with 61 comments

• by rossdavidh on 7/6/22, 1:22 PM

  I 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.

• by bowsamic on 7/6/22, 8:53 AM

  I 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

• by amelius on 7/6/22, 7:16 AM

  > 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.

• by teekert on 7/6/22, 10:33 AM

  I’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.

• by Vanit on 7/6/22, 6:50 AM

  This 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.

• by LetThereBeLight on 7/6/22, 2:40 PM

  Funny 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.

• by throwoutway on 7/6/22, 11:58 AM

  Perhaps 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

• by Topolomancer on 7/6/22, 7:51 AM

  Not 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.

• by YesThatTom2 on 7/8/22, 12:09 PM

  My 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.”

• by tpoacher on 7/6/22, 5:26 PM

  This 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.

• by rob_c on 7/6/22, 11:20 AM

  stupidity >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.

• by seydor on 7/6/22, 7:07 AM

  Stupidity 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