The importance of stupidity in scientific research (2008) [pdf]
web.stanford.edu
web.stanford.edu
Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. I even think it’s supposed to be this way:
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... [and yet] an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too.
I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that [one of my professors] 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.
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Exactly my relationship with computers and all things cybernetic: riding on the jagged edge of my stupidity. I will never figure it all out.
Great. Wrong use of"stupid", IMHO, because it's an oxymoron like feel numb and, while one may be ignorant of something, eg. of the memory architecture and the losses of firefox that frequently leads into crashes, you can't really be stupid of (or about) something, if to stupify rather implies loss (of brain cells).
And why was this published in cell research?
Because a quality academic journal is more than DOI-minting paper mill. Cell Research in particular regular has commentary and essays about the state of microbiology research, advice for scientists at various career stages, biographical sketches or interviews with various scientists, and even humor (search "sticky wicket" in the Cell archives for examples of that last).
Sometimes I worry that I will get stuck and will end up with nothing to show, and I try to remind myself that I am going into uncharted territory and getting stuck is to be expected. The only way that I will definitely end up with nothing to show is if I let my worries take over and quit.
It leads me to believe that STEM fields shouldn’t be so selective in weeding out below average students. So if you increase the population of researchers/tinkerers, the probability of one of them stumbling across something incredibly useful rises. Obviously it depends on the field though and the cost of individual failures needs to be minimized.