Mistakes I Have Made in My Research Career
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As a fellow researcher, I would question you get to have a second career following his advice. I wonder if he would be standing there giving this advice as a senior researcher, if he would have followed it himself.
I agree that it would probably be more useful for science, but from what I observe, it does not help in the current scientific environment. Scientific funding is a dog eat dog world.
When I was an academic I tried to follow a middle path. 75% herd following (more accurately arbitrage exploitation taking advantage that certain fields lag others so applying something old from one field is seen as cutting edge in another), 25% high risk. I would have loved to have spent more time on the high risk activities, but it is just too risky.
We really, really, really, really need to change the way science is funded. Not more funding, smarter funding. We get exactly the results we should expect from the totally stupid way science is funded.
/s I have a totally novel idea - how about we use science to determine how science funding should be allocated. /s
So much of being a professional researcher these days requires one to not upset the apple cart.
"We" includes the funding agencies, the prevailing theories of the day, the ways that our institutions are structured, and the individual researchers themselves.
Failure occurs at all length scales: minutes, hours, days, years, decades.
A failure isn't necessarily a mistake.
It's nice to hear the anecdote, though! So often the only things we hear about science are the successes.
The function of research is to discover new knowledge, a task often dependent on questioning old knowledge. Worse, when collective operations favor collective mindedness, they are obstructing research by displacing open mindedness.
The post is a valuable recollection that should be internalized at any expense.
I would rather say, that researcher needs to train himself to start with completely neutral attitude to any new idea. Sometimes even old idea deserves to be examined from scratch. This needs a very specific skill to shut off existing beliefs and to start from blank page.
It is all bayesian. You get new proposition, assign 0.5 likelyhood to it, and then you start thinking. While you think you must be ready to reject any idea regardless of its plausibility, if such a rejection allow to see things from new angle. Probably it will lead to some kind of contradiction, but you might not know it a priori, so the only way to be sure is to try it.
All this test rejections should be done systematically and consiously. Or you need to be a genius to do it intuitively in right circumstances.
It needs training, and the best training I know is to learn how to agree with anyone. One need to learn how to understand point of view of other person and to look from that point of view. I'm really surprised, that psychiatrist can make mistakes of not accepting some ideas before taking a close look at them. I tend to believe that ability to understand any point of view, even delirium one, is the key tool for psychiatrist.