Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gupie | Hacker News Reader

But he is not talking about education, about doing a course, where "getting the right answer makes you file smart". He is talking about research where nobody knows the right answer.

View on HN

Martin absolutely was talking about education; research is education. Granted, not early education, but I’m not making any claims about what he said, I simply used his quote as a segue to make an observation about the connections between research thinking and today’s math curriculum. Research is a continuous spectrum. We are expecting kids in elementary, secondary, and early college to have a research mentality and research level motivation in order to succeed in math classes, unlike some other subjects. (Classes which, btw, were all research topics at some point in time and took tens, hundreds, even thousands of years to develop.) The mentality and motivation are important if you want to end up doing any of the actual graduate, post-graduate, or career research where nobody knows the right answer. The kids who are pruned out by our math system never make it there, and many don’t even make it to functional math literacy, even though many/most are perfectly capable, and that’s unfortunate and doesn’t reflect well on our education system. I’m suggesting we can do better.

I don't disagree with what you have just said except I understand education to refer to the transfer of knowledge while research is the discovery of new knowledge.

Curiously the root of that word is 'to search again', meaning more like 'reviewing sources in the library' and less like 'doing experiments in the lab'.

re- in this case is probably an intensive prefix rather than indicating repetition. this is an uncommon re- in english, but does occur, for example in 'refried beans', a calque from spanish where intensive re- is still a productive prefix

so it probably means 'search really hard' rather than 'search again'

Research is wholly about the transfer of knowledge, both before and after any associated experimentation. Sometimes there is discovery in between, but not always; survey papers and meta analyses are research, a very important part of research. Experiments that don’t research previous work and don’t communicate the results aren’t research and usually don’t result in the discovery of new knowledge. Can’t know it’s new unless you research what’s already known.

You could argue education is wholly about the transfer of knowledge, but research isn't. The fundamental difference between research and education is the discovery of new knowledge. You can be educated without doing research, and you need an education to do research, but without this discovery of new knowledge you are not doing research. You can also do research without communicating the results, just like you can write a book without publishing it.

Research is discovery with a healthy dose of self-education.

I’m lucky enough to have had opportunity and encouragement to do research most of my career, and work closely with other researchers for decades.

The first job of a researcher is to understand what others have done, before attempting discovery. Failure to do that critical step means it’s not considered research. The second job is to build on the work of others. And the third job is to communicate those results to others. Discovery is the seeking of knowledge, which is education. Framing it as self-education is feeding a narrative of research as being an individual sport, but in reality research is entirely a collaborative team sport with incremental dependent results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com