It suits many people but not everyone, because some people, even though they are super-smart, not stupid, are not comfortable with feeling at a loss, and being constantly defeated by the absence of knowledge that surrounds researchers.
Home Advertise Archives Features. March 12, Feature Story. Share Tweet Email. Throwing out the pedagogical baby with the technologically unenhanced bathwater November 7, The truth is out there, says Merlin Crossley November 4, 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.
What I like about this excerpt - and about the entire article - is that with a very few changes, it could be speaking of writing. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about times more than I did. 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. 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. 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. The Company of Biologists provides funding to organisers of meetings, workshops and conferences in the fields covered by our journals, together with travelling fellowships for those wishing to make collaborative visits to other research laboratories.
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