sciencegeekgirl » The importance of feeling stupid

photo by swanskalot - flickr

I was just pointed to this wonderful essay about the importance of stupidity in scientific research (Martin Schwartz, Journal of Cell Science). It’s a short and wonderful little essay, and points out what it is that is so satisfying about scientific research — and what makes it so hard. And how so many students are somewhat misled as to this fact — they’re used to feeling smart, and so may leave the sciences because they feel dumb. As an interesting side note, the story the author starts out with is that of a woman leaving the field because she feels stupid all the time. I, myself, am a woman who left physics because it seemed like the men knew more than me, it just wasn’t “easy” enough for me. I wonder, is the stupidity problem perhaps more damaging to women than to men?

Here’s a pertinent paragraph from the essay, which gave me a little “a-hah” moment right now, years after my PhD!

I’d like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do studentsa disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students aremade to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very,very hard it is to do important research. It’s a lot harderthan taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficultis that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’tknow what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re askingthe right question or doing the right experiment until we getthe answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harderby competition for grants and space in top journals. But apartfrom all of that, doing significant research is intrinsicallyhard and changing departmental, institutional or national policieswill not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.

…

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusingon important questions puts us in the awkward position of beingignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is thatit 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 accustomedto getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels ofconfidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientificeducation might do more to ease what is a very big transition:from learning what other people once discovered to making yourown discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid,the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likelywe are to make big discoveries.

A commenter (John Clement, Houston TX) commented on the listserv where this was posted:

One problem with science is that it may seem to be very simple, because it is generally taught early on in a very didactive fashion. But later on it is only accessible when you are willing to acknowledge the confusion, and work through it. This is expecially true in physics. Other subjects may be more attractive because this may not be as evident early on. History is
often acknowledged to be confusing, and students expect this. Math on the other hand is so rigidly taught that students who can not tolerate confusion will choose it over science. Students tend to think that science is rigid, and that is part of the problem with our educational system.

I suspect that many students leave science when they begin to encounter significant confusion. Often they have had success, and did not experience confusion in previous courses.

Of course, there is the flip side of the coin — if it’s too easy, you get bored, and don’t learn either. Below is a graph of optimum “flow” (by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) illustrating this concept: