The importance of stupidity in scientific research

That is the title of an article by Dr. Schwartz, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at U of Virginia. A short and interesting article, and probably helpful for those who are struggling with some research project. If you have done a research project on your own, you are familiar with the moments when you just want to bang your head against the desk, or monitor (or whatever hard place you can find), from the frustration of days and nights of being stuck with apparently unsolvable questions and problems at hand, and feeling you are the most stupid person in the universe. How to manage your stupidity or at a higher level, how to turn it into "productive stupidity", is quite a lesson you should learn in the course of a good research work.

A good adviser could play a key role here, in helping you over come the frustration you'd feel from time to time. Whenever I feel frustrated or hopeless after some time of not making progress or even having results that shows some assumptions from the beginning were false, my adviser here tells me, "hey that is science, if it was supposed to be easy and straightforward, we would have been out of business!"

Anyway, here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

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.

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.

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.

...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.
-- Martin A. Schwartz