Looking for an unrelated topic, I stumbled across a transcript of a talk, ‘You and Your Research’
at Bell Labs given by Richard Hamming in 1986. I think it’s worth reading if you’re a scientist, mathematician or computer programmer.
“In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves alibis why they don’t. They keep saying that it is a matter of luck. I’ve told you how easy it is; furthermore I’ve told you how to reform. Therefore, go forth and become great scientists!”
For me, the most compelling part of his talk is a question we should all be asking ourselves: what are the most important questions/problems in our respective fields? If we’re not working on them — why not?
Why not?
Because we are slaves of the Bell Curve. We can’t be all special or great. And there is nothing wrong with that.
Most of us are afraid to take risks; we opt for the safety of what’s been proven instead of challenging or pushing the boundaries on existing concepts.
welcome back!
In fact it is counterproductive for everybody to go for the most important questions since it means everybody is doing the same thing.
It is a common practice though among the top groups in a scientific field. They all end up doing the same paper around the same time, making it into a rat race to see who publishes it first.
Needless to say if they had diversified their interest they could have moved their attention to a less interesting question/problem, got a good paper and actually contributed more to the ‘progress of scientific knowledge’.
The great irony is therefore that pursueing less interesting questions would be more productive.
Because we are slaves of the Bell Curve. No we aren’t. We make the bell curve – not the other way round.
mark tummers said:
“In fact it is counterproductive for everybody to go for the most important questions since it means everybody is doing the same thing.”I don’t agree with everything Hamming says, but it’s food for thought.
I think you’ll agree with me that science is getting bigger in all the physical sciences, in that it seems difficult for small groups to tackle the big problems.
However, I think a creative (and attentive) mind can look forward in their own field and see where the important questions will focus, and work on something there. Not that there’s anything wrong with basic science and doing ‘less interesting questions’. I think Hamming was suggesting ways in which to reach for one’s potential.
A very talented young researcher I know recently refused a very interesting problem that crossed his desk because it wasn’t a problem in his strongest expertise and also didn’t have funding attached. It sounds very practical and also a little restrictive, but whatever works for each individual.
Wow – what a gem of an article! It was full of wisdom. Thanks for pointing it out. As you say, there is certainly plenty to ponder – my mind is reeling (though that might also be the wine)…!
In no way, shape or form is there a shortage of great and important questions in any field. There is only a shortage of people who can recognize what they are and articulate them well enough to get the resources to pursue them.
I think the reason that there is so much duplication relates more to fads and a lack of vision and funding difficulties than to any shortage of productive ways of going forward.
In my opinion, the idea that there is a “most important” question that needs to be addressed “next” is a bad and ill formed concept. Most new questions relate to the interactions of answers that we already have. Those new questions will be important and appreciated as important when ever the answers to the old questions become available. There may be different sets of questions, but there is no foreseeable end to important questions. We shouldn’t pretend that there is.
The way I think of doing research on only the X most important questions the same as eating a diet only containing the X most important nutrients. Eventually you are going to die of a deficiency of the X+1’th most important nutrient.
I agree with David in that there are no shortage of ‘important questions’ out there. I think what Hamming was trying to get at in his talk was that there are questions that ‘go somewhere’ and address fundamental issues in the field of choice. I don’t think they all have to be ‘big questions’. I can give some good examples (bet we all could) of papers that made an impact but addressed basic research questions. A good example would be when Jess Marr, Renee Rubio and John Quackenbush published a paper that showed that gene expression seems to follow a Poisson distribution. Everyone was assuming this, but that paper showed strong evidence for it as late as 2006. It wasn’t big giant science but has a lot of impact for systems biology and modeling of cell signaling. That’s an example of a fundamentally important problem. I like to think there are ways of constantly assessing our understanding of where the important questions are and are leading the field. We can choose not to work on them directly, but that kind of understanding seems to me to be an important ‘background voice’ in anything we as scientists choose to do if we want to make an impact on our field and on the world. Not that any of this matters for everyone’s life — but that’s just my $0.02.
Awesome. I enjoyed it.
There are important questions and there are big questions. Hamming made a distinction; he said that no one worked on time travel, teleportation, or antigravity. It wasn’t that these were not big questions, but that there was no avenue of attack. There was no method to make incremental progress on them at the moment. Work on such questions doesn’t add to a body of knowledge that is useful in other areas. It is like swinging for a home run (an American euphemism), all or nothing.
There is another text on how to be successful, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War
Given how important competition is in science these days, virtually all of the steps required and the mindset for achieving success in science are the same as Sun Tzu laid out in his writings. The details are trivially different, but details always are. It boils down to knowing yourself, knowing how to achieve success and then acquiring the resources to do so while denying the resources to be successful to your opponent(s).
This is for success in science via competition and when necessary via conflict and war. The primary competition in science is for resources, funding, lab space, good collaborators, good post docs, students, publication space, media press release space, etc. You don’t need to kill your opponents in science, simply deny them the resources they need to compete with you and you will succeed and they will not.
That is why people don’t deposit sequences, don’t share materials, don’t allow others to annotate their work. If you control the resources, you prevent others from using them.
“Because we are slaves of the Bell Curve. No we aren’t. We make the bell curve – not the other way round.”
I would say that that is just semantics: the only way you can make a bell curve is by plotting it on a piece of paper or on your computer. In all other respects you are just one data point on the bell curve.
You can meet a random person and assume he is average or close to average and mostly you will be right. If you are a gambler you insist this person is brilliant or a moron. And sometimes you win the jackpot.
It’s just statistics.
I don’t get the excessive focus on brilliance in all aspects of our society. It’s all nice and such, but it totally disregards reality. Obviously we humans are masters of disregarding reality, but we are supposed to be rational scientists.
And with our “excessive” education and “intelligence” being scientists and all, we are of course at the extreme of the bell curve of the entire population. But if we isolate ourselves as a new group from the general population we form a new Bell curve. And obviously most of us aren’t going to be exceptional on this new Bell curve of scientists.
You can’t make yourself to be brilliant. You also can’t grow yourself another leg.
What can happen is that an average person (as oin a person from the middle spectrum of the Bell Curve) makes a brilliant discovery. There is no law against that. And since there are much more of them they constitute a larger proportion of scientific progress. Hence there is no shame in being average or not exceptional.
I suggest the following slogan (although it might be partly copyrighted):
“I’m average and i’m lovin’ it!”
“That is why people don’t deposit sequences, don’t share materials, don’t allow others to annotate their work. If you control the resources, you prevent others from using them.”
This doesn’t go as much as you’d think in the biological sciences. There are some data sets that are jealously guarded — for a while, sure. Eventually the data sets are released, especially if they’re published, and doubly especially if they’re funded by government agencies. The old chestnut of people jealously hoarding their data sets in perpetuity (at least in the biological sciences) doesn’t hold. The attitude seems more of ‘swoop and glean and publish and release’, otherwise data tends to become outdated very quickly.
I would like to state that I disagree; people hoard like crazy also in biological sciences.
I have seen many examples and unfortunately the nature of my non-anonymous status here prevents me from disclosing any of them.
Oh; i looked at your profile and see that you are into bioinformatics.
The situation is a bit different there I guess. The raw database is just a raw database.
Maybe there is a difference between the different subdisciplines?
The Art of War is one of the standard texts in business degrees and other business courses, these days.
I was thinking more about the problems of annotation in GenBank. Leaving sole control of entries with the original author is untenable in the long term. The proposal suggested by a group of mycologists, suggesting something akin to how botanical or other type-specimens are dealt with will be more useful in the long term. Eventually everything pertaining to a specific organism should be linked together somewhere somehow.
Maxine, I appreciate that. I think to some extent that is unfortunate. War and the type of competition exemplified by it is a zero-sum game. For every winner there is someone who has lost what the winner won, and they both lost the costs of their conflict. Via cooperation everyone can win, but not as much as the few winning individuals can win via conflict.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that the wisest general makes the possibility of losing impossible, then sets about to achieve victory. In some types of conflict, the only way to not lose is to never get into conflict in the first place. This is why researchers are becoming more and more conservative in what they propose. To become unfunded is to lose. To work so hard one doesn’t have time for a life is to lose. When you turn up the screws of competition, the most competitive scientists first makes sure that he/she cannot lose. In some cases that means abandoning being a scientist. When that happens we all lose what they might have done.
Transactional analysis is also used in business and marketing courses. It it works (or if they think it does), they’ll use it.
How to be great? The only answer: To be great. But much better is to be ordinary.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu says that the wisest general makes the possibility of losing impossible, then sets about to achieve victory. In some types of conflict, the only way to not lose is to never get into conflict in the first place. This is why researchers are becoming more and more conservative in what they propose.
David, that’s a very intersting concept you put forward. Could it also be the reason why scientists don’t hang out on forums and places like this on a mass scale? Forums and blogs are merely a place where conflict is likely to appear.
I noticed myself that during journal clubs nowadays nobody (as in students) voices their opinion any more except a few. I asked some people why. And mostly it is because there is more to lose than to gain. A bad impression will last longer than a good one. So why stick your neck out by asking a question that is potentially ‘stupid’ or a remark that might offend someone who can decided over your future.
It’s of course a shame, but can you really blame the people?
(Ulysses S Grant)
Much better than Sun Tzu’s turgid philosophies.
“So why stick your neck out by asking a question that is potentially ‘stupid’ or a remark that might offend someone who can decided over your future.”
Agreed, if we want to be put in a position where someone with a vendetta can potentially decide on our future. Which is, of course, more often than not in the sciences, but also for just about anywhere else.
I believe that anyone with a professional/personal vendetta is a failure as a scientist and a human being. I don’t think everyone shares my beliefs, though.
I believe that anyone with a professional/personal vendetta is a failure as a scientist and a human being.
I’m going to agree with you here; they sure hinder science, whether they realize it or not.
It can be incredibly motivating to have an open discussion on a scientific problem or concept. And with so many demotivating aspects present in science (for instance: another experiment failed) it can be just the thing you need to keep going.
mmm I agree with you two.
I went to a conference two weeks ago, not knowing a thing about the subject (excepting undergrad courses a long time ago) and it was really really good. No one treated me like an idiot either (except for one guy but I think that was a personality defect. He treated everyone like that).
Deane, I agree with you, such people are failures at being human beings. Unfortunately carrying a vendetta can make them successes at other things.
They do hinder science. But hindering science can still bring individual success. Anyone can “compete” by bringing someone else down. An analogous situation is going on in Zimbabwe. Mugabe is hindering just about every aspect of life in Zimbabwe. He is moving the country back into the dark ages, causing damage that will take decades to correct. But he personally is doing great. People who support him are doing great. That is the epitome of zero-sum success.
Measuring success by zero-sum metrics will encourage and even force zero-sum competition.
I guess it is all relative.
I like your analogy with Mugabe.
One of the most frequent complaints I hear from PhD students and postdocs is how the infrastructure in the institute is not really organized according to their needs. They do “all” the work, yet why are they constantly hindered by silly restriction, regulations, and situations.
But from the perspective of the administrative unit, glassware unit etc, and groupleaders the situation is quite different. They see a perfectly organized institute.
Who is right?
Mark, I think you just described organizational behaviour, where different parts of the organization have different perspectives according to the role each part performs. (And there is further granularity in that different individuals (eg “PhD students”) within a unit will be of unequal ability).
“Who is right?” isn’t an answerable question in this context, I suggest.
Mark: I noticed myself that during journal clubs nowadays nobody (as in students) voices their opinion any more except a few. I asked some people why. And mostly it is because there is more to lose than to gain. A bad impression will last longer than a good one. So why stick your neck out by asking a question that is potentially ‘stupid’ or a remark that might offend someone who can decided over your future.
Genuinely sorry to hear that Mark – sounds like whoever is leading the journal club perhaps hasn’t established the right culture, where it’s OK to ask a stupid question. I would have thought it the duty of a good teacher/mentor to instill a sufficiently supportive atmosphere. As the Chinse proberb goes (one I often quote to students): Better a fool for 5 minutes than a fool for life. But I guess David W’s ‘zero sum game’ may have taken a firm hold…