※ [本文转录自 Chemistry 看板] 作者: buteo (找寻人与人的键结) 看板: Chemistry 标题: [好文] 愚笨在科学研究上的重要性 时间: Sun Apr 18 20:52:20 2010 http://jcs.biologists.org/cgi/content/full/121/11/1771 原文发表在Journal of Cell Science 实验室学长把这篇文章贴在我们休息室的墙壁 我很喜欢这篇 随着做的实验越多 咀嚼其中的话语就越有滋味 但受限於英文+中文能力 有些地方翻译未能到位 不过还是翻译出来和大家分享 还请多指教 俊毅Bird Man ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The importance of stupidity in scientific research 愚笨在科学研究的重要性 Martin A. Schwartz Department of Microbiology, UVA Health System, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22908, USA e-mail: [email protected] Accepted 9 April 2008 I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else. 最近我遇到一位许久未碰面的老朋友，我们在同一时间念研究所，一起研究科学，尽管是 在不同领域。她研究所念到一半放弃，转攻哈佛法学院，现在在一家大型环境公司担任资 深律师。聊天话题转到她当时为什麽会放弃研究所。让我吃惊的是，她说那是因为念研究 所让她觉得自己很笨。有好些年她每天都觉得自己很笨，所以她决定要去做些其他事。 I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain. 我一直认为她在我所认识的人之中是最聪明的，於她随後的职场表现也证明了我的观点。 她所说的话困扰着我，我一直想着这件事。有一天，我心头一震，是的，科学这码事也让 我觉得自己很笨，只不过我已经习惯这种感觉了。事实上我想到了该如何运用这种感觉， 我不知道若没这种感觉我该做甚麽。我甚至觉得这不是本来就理所当然的吗？请听我解释 。 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. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart. 对大多数的人来说，之所以在高中、大学会喜欢科学是因为成绩表现突出。这不见得是唯 一的原因，对了解世界运行深感兴趣以及很想发现新事物也是可能的理由。但是高中、大 学的科学代表着修课，而在课堂上表现良好意谓着在考试回答正确答案。如果你知道这些 答案，你会表现杰出而觉得自己聪明。 A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did. 在博士班你必须开始研究计画，这是完全不同的事。对我而言，这是令人气馁的任务。我 怎麽可能构想能引领重要发现的题目？设计并执行实验而能给予令人信服的结论？预见困 难并找寻方法绕过困难，或是遇到困境时能解决他？我的博士研究主题涉及多重领域，有 一阵子，每当我遇到问题时，我就纠缠系上相关领域的老师。我记得有一天Henry Taube( 译注：Henry Taube在1983年因在错合物氧化还原机制探讨有重大贡献而获诺贝尔化学奖) 回答他不知道怎样解决我在他的领域遇到的问题。我只是个小博三，而且我知道Taube懂 得比我多1000倍(保守估计)。如果他不能解答这个问题，没有其他人可以。 That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. 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. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. 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. 这在当时重重的打击我：没人可以！这就是为什麽称之为「研究题目」。而作为「我」的 研究题目，这应该是由「我」来解决才对。一但我开始正视这个残酷的事实，几天後我就 解决了这个问题。(其实这并非真的很难，我只需要试几个实验就好。) 宝贵的一课：我 所不知道的事并不仅是很多，而是无限！了解这道理後，我并没有觉得沮丧，反而获得纾 解。如果我们的无知程度是无限，唯一能做的就是尽我们所能的去搞。 I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty. 我认为我们的博士班课程常会对学生的养成帮倒忙。首先，我不认为学生天生就了解他们 所作的研究有多难，而作重要的研究更是靠背难。这比修最重的课也难得多。研究会难是 因为其沉浸在未知中。我们不知道我们正在做甚麽，我们也不确定是不是问了个对的问题 或是做了对的实验，直到我们得到了结果。无可否认地，科学在经费有限与发表顶尖期刊 的竞争下更形艰辛。但把这部分抽离，做掷地有声的研究仍是他X的难，而改变系上规定 、机构方针、国家政策都不会减少研究内在的难度。 Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project. 第二，我们在教育学生该如何拥有「具生产力的愚笨」仍做得不够好。这指的是如果我们 不觉得自己笨，那代表我们试的不够勤。我并非谈论「相对愚笨」，相对愚笨是指同在班 上的学生确实念了书，并拿了比你好的成绩。我也不是谈论聪明人从事不符他们才智的工 作。科学让我们正视我们的「绝对愚笨」，这种愚笨是存在的事实，在我们嚐试把自己推 向未知时便会发现。举办预口试与论文口试是个好构想，委员会的老师不断的考验学生， 直到学生开始回答错误答案或是放弃，说「我不知道」。这些考验的目的不是要看学生是 否能正确回答各个问题。如果学生都正确的回答每个问题，那失败的是老师而不是学生。 这些考验一部分是为了测验学生的弱点，哪里还需要加强；一部分是看学生所具备知识是 不是能撑到很高等级的关卡才败下阵来，看他们是否准备好接受研究计画的挑战。 Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. 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. 具生产力的愚笨是指我们可以选择性的忽略愚笨这件事，专注在重要的问题会让我们很难 去忽略自己的愚笨。科学美丽的其中一面是祂允许我们犯错，一错再错，但当我们学到些 道理时又能感觉一切都是如此完美。无庸置疑地。这对习惯甚麽问题都要能回答正确的学 生很困难。无庸置疑地，一定程度的自信与情绪恢复力能帮助我们，但我想科学教育应该 要做得更多：从学习别人的发现到自己发现事物有很大的鸿沟。当我们对自己的愚笨越感 到自在，我们越能够深入未知并更有机会做出重大发现。 --

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