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The importance of stupidity in scientific research（转自未名BBS）  2009-04-04 21:44  |  (分类:默认分类)

发信人: emptyhb (bio02|带着梦想去飞), 信区: AdvancedEdu
标  题: Why and how Ph.D.
发信站: 北大未名站 (2009年04月04日03:36:41 星期六), 转信
   

Ph.D.进入第三年，感悟不少，成果还不多@@
不过至今还觉得过得很开心，还想一辈子干，所以前三年自以为收获不小
今天朋友发来一篇Essay，内容是一位教授谈他对ph.d.的一些感悟，深有同感，特别是
"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"

 First published online May 20, 2008
doi: 10.1242/10.1242/jcs.033340
Journal of Cell Science 121, 1771 (2008)
Published by The Company of Biologists 2008

    Essay
    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.