During my casual reading on other science blogs this weekend, I came across Martin Schwartz's short essay "The importance of stupidity in scientific research" [1] and immediately felt like I was reading about my own thoughts and feelings at times. By Sehnsucht1 here I just mean that bittersweet itch to understand something while feeling incompetent the whole way through. I feel stupid a lot when I work on technical or scientific challenges. Plenty of times I've felt discouraged or demotivated, but I keep going because I'm fascinated and I want to know, uncover, and solve problems, even if I have no idea how, or even if I'm completely naive to the field.
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| Figure 1. Journal of Cell Science page for Schwartz 2008 |
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.
That is pretty much how I've felt my entire life. The difference is I didn't go into science or math because I was necessarily "good" at them, but rather because of my deep curiosity and need for understanding.
Throughout my education and career I've wandered into domains of science and engineering that I have no formal training in and took the mindset that I can kind of figure things out as I go. This is both exciting and demoralizing at times. I will say though that with emergence of AI tooling for research and engineering tasks, the feeling of incompetence is not as pronounced as it used to be.
I like Schwartz's framing of productive stupidity, though I'd tweak the wording a bit. The useful version, for me, is informational naivety, not bad judgment and not performance ignorance or skipping foundations. It's that you lack the context or domain knowledge, so you feel out of place. Sometimes that shows up as hesitation about what to do next. Sometimes it shows up as being overly excited about the impact, or overconfident that you can pull off something that is highly complex and a huge lift. It is probably true that everyone sits in this state at some point. Either you don't know that you don't know, or you think you know because nothing has proven you wrong yet. That kind of gap is what research actually lives in.
... if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. ... Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice.
The quote lands for me because the useful move is choosing the hard questions anyway, then converting that missing context into something workable as you go. Embracing the risk of failing is part of that, which I do a lot. Failing because you do not know is often how you end up knowing something later. It is a fine line, though, between usefully ignorant and just being a buffoon.
I think that is also why I was particularly open to research and remained persistent, whether or not I was actually good at the hypothesis generation, planning, execution, data analysis, and conclusions. Those are harder to quantify and I'm not sure I am even actually any good at those things. I try to be careful and principled, but it is hard because research and development, in my view, are like a river. You start cleanly at point A with all your provisions and try to get to point B as intact as possible, but along the way you hit confluences, bifurcations, rapids, waterfalls, and shallows that break things, make you lose stuff, and forget where the final destination is. Research is very much like that!
The point is I enjoy research because I don't treat it like a homework or test problem. A pattern I've seen is people treating it as if there is some generally understood answer and the goal is to show your work toward that known answer, or to state a hypothesis and just assume you were always going to affirm the premise. The truth is most research questions or hypotheses are either poorly framed or most likely not going to be answered cleanly ... this isn't to say thats a bad thing its just the typical way things are actually done. I would say that the culumnation of your research endeavor can often be stated in some three sentences or so:
We thought this was a good question or idea. We couldn't do the experiment or research as we thought, so our hypothesis couldn't be tested. But here is what we found though.
I agree with Schwartz that "productively stupid" is a useful framing if you want to keep moving in R&D. For me it's mostly about being willing to sit in ignorance long enough to turn it into knowledge. That is my provisional stance anyway ... get comfortable being naive without turning it into an excuse or acting like a buffoon.
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