北欧林海，偏远小屋

The importance of stupidity in scientific research
Martin A. Schwartz

Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA

e-mail: maschwartz@virginia.edu

Accepted 9 April 2008

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.