Aber eigentli bloss diejenigen, wo .... .
Für einmal ein Text ganz in english,
hab ihn MIT Wörterbuch gelesen und glaub sogar verstanden.
(NEIN: MIT bedeutet hier NICHT MIT!)
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.
Das Original gibt's hier:
http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full
/9688-Zeitung%20Leser%20Aha.jpg)
