I began programming "late" in life (around age 30), and was initially confused at the number of programmers in their mid-30s who decide they are too old to program. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that, while they expected to feel like they didn't know what they were doing when they began programming at age 15, they somewhere along the line expected to never feel that way again.
Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year).
If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
The lack of enthusiasm to learn new stuff is also due to opportunity costs and “exploration vs exploitation“ dynamics.
You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.
Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.
To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.
Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.
Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.
A lot of teenagers and below have zero humility. Arrogance can be useful to get you past the stage when you're terrible and don't realize it, to when you actually are good.
My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers.
Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days.
I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
I’m 19, blind, and currently feel this way. I tried to learn new skills early on so I don’t struggle to keep up with my classmates later on. Sometimes I feel it isn’t enough.
I think the most intense part of feeling stupid is gotten over in the first couple of years of PhD. If you’ve gotten through that you’ve probably crossed a huge and insurmountable barrier between novice and expert. After that it’s not as bad bc you know you can do it again.
For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments
Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
> Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want
This was my case during my PhD (physics). My supervisor was not competent enough in my field of studies to help me from a science perspective (I had a co-supervisor who had more information, but not too much - it was a really unique area at that time).
BUT - he was a wonderful, extraordinary person when helping me travel the muddy waters of academia. He was always there to arrange after some, let's say, more "heavy" discussions. I was really delighted to have him as a supervisor.
He also let me roam free in innovative areas, he supported me when I wanted to publish 45 pages of thesis, when the norm was more 200+. He was really, really great.
I started to work in academia during my PhD and he was concerned I would not finish it. I sworn him that I would, before the end of the millenium. I had my defense mid December of the last year :)
I kept on visiting him over the years, presented him my children but he unfortunately died last year. RIP Prof. J.
I argue, that the ability to ask stupid questions is one of the most important skills to learn during your phd. Too many people avoid asking those questions, because they think they make them look stupid. In reality I estimate that in many cases a large fraction of the people listening were asking themselves the same question. Many "stupid" questions are not even stupid by any definition they are just basic (and are often not simply to answer either). Asking these questions enables one to really understand a subject.
I would also argue that it really does not take to be a postdoc to ask these questions. Hardly anyone thinks "this was a stupid question".
Yes, but conversly after too long at the top, this leads to some professors thinking they know about everything and approaching a problem like they're an expert.
Feeling stupid isn't good, relising you don't know everything and how that doesn't make you stupid is. Especially when you then harness that into driving yourself to learn about whatever that is, childcare, science, politics...
If you start to act like you can do no wrong then you get situations like academics system getting hacked. The IT guys have to deal with the fall-out, and the academic is still demaning that they get full root access to do the same thing all over again despite not learning from the situation.
I can totally relate! Asking the basic premise questions, for me at least, is what allows the more complex parts of presentations to click into place. Like it all just sits in the buffer, percolating, recombining, and I just need that seed crystal for the whole thing to click. I think my goal during every scientific interaction is to really find the most basic, simple thing I'm missing because I find those details the most valuable to learn. They help put into place so many other disparate things because they are foundational knowledge.
> Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant.
My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
Same here, cultivating motivation is definitely the hardest part of the job. Academic work needs months if not years get out and have impact and, personally, I don't get to discuss my work too often with people because it's too specialized.
> 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.
Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
Ignoring the incentives is a key skill in science. And in all creative work in general. If you respond strongly to external incentives, you are unlikely to create anything truly novel, because you are doing what others are telling you to do. You may be good, and you may be successful, but your work is probably not as good as it could be.
I’m also a scientist. I very much agree with this, I even think you have an enormous advantage over colleagues who avoid feeling stupid! There is so much interesting stuff that makes you feel stupid.
I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude.
Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
One of my friends had a Nobel Laureate as a professor. The professor half-jokingly told everyone that getting a Nobel prize is easy, just disprove something that everyone accepts as accepted truth.
This is what really struck me when I tried some game dev in my free time. All that experience and intuition that makes me feel smart was missing. I imagine the feeling is significantly more intense when you're literally studying the unknown.
Funny to see this pop up, it's from 2008. I worked with Martin for quite a few years and we spoke about this article at one point. If I recall, the intended audience of this article is primarily incoming graduate students.The point being that the experience of doing research is very different from taking classes. It is not uncommon to see those who excelled in their undergraduate studies go on to graduate school and be dismayed to find that a PhD program uses a different skill set from getting good grades.
Perhaps more scientists need to be self-aware and feel stupid, rather than cocksure confident & wrong. But the incentives in university, popsci, etc make that harder
I think this is a common misconception, perhaps amplified by popsci and the media stoking outrage. Granted this is anecdata, but I belong to a family of scientists (myself, both parents, spouse, one sibling, his spouse), and live in a town where you can't spit without hitting a scientist.
Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us!
As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms.
What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.
Not related to the content, but does anyone else get a 403 error when using a smartphone with Chrome to visit the link? I have to explicitly check "desktop site" to get access here.
Need I mention the reproducibility crisis, poor funding models, retractions from front-page of nature within the single field...
"Naivete" I can agree with. Stupidity is not and should _never_ be encouraged or endorsed. Even if common use of American English tends to push the meaning of the former onto the latter.
Definitions of words are very important when communicating openly and honestly. This is not an attack on commonly used words in American language, it's an observation. British English (and I assume others) are following suit as America leads the way in "english-speaking" culture. Mixing word definitions is entering into a quasi-mixed up state where people don't know the exact definitions of words which makes difficult good-faith conversation difficult.
Stupidity is the wrong word, imperfection perhaps. All scientists must feel stupid , but there is a culture of polished, perfect research that is mostly fake, like all perfect things
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
Inevitably, technology changes, and at some point you have to learn a new language, programming paradigm, database, or what-have-you. One feels again that one does not know what to do, at first. It's rather like feeling stupid. I have become able simply to say to myself, 'ah, yes, that feeling again, it shall pass in time', and just keep working at it (whatever 'it' is that year).
If you haven't felt like you don't know what you're doing in many years, your programming career has stalled, and I believe you should seek out a new skill to learn that makes you feel stupid while learning it, pronto. It takes practice to remain calm while having that feeling, and if you haven't had it in years you might let it panic you into thinking you can no longer program.
[+] [-] throwawayarnty|3 years ago|reply
You spend time and effort when you are younger (eg 15) to develop skills that allow you to be productive and valuable.
Learning entirely orthogonal skills when you’re older no longer pays off after a certain point because the opportunity cost of not using your existing skills to produce becomes too large.
To make an extreme analogy, there is no point in Warren Buffet to learn to program at his stage of his career (or even 30 years ago). Any time spent not reading financial reports is such a huge opportunity cost that he really has no reason to learn any other skill.
Another extreme example is Lang Lang the pianist has no reason to pick up the violin. He has absolutely nothing to gain by learning new musical instruments.
Science is a special career where learning new things is important for longevity. A productive science career involves breaking new ground, picking up the low hanging fruit before your competitors do, then move on to break new ground once your old field becomes saturated. Learning new things is strategic, where you try to leverage existing expertise to break ground in new fields.
[+] [-] worker_person|3 years ago|reply
My daughter is learning HTML & CSS, as she's getting annoyed with copying and pasting headers.
Her work is ugly as can be, but she is totally in love with it and proud of it. Think back to early Geocities days.
I'm sure one day she will be embarrassed by her early work, but for now, she's enthusiastic and gaining useful skills.
[+] [-] mrcartmeneses|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unix_fan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bowsamic|3 years ago|reply
For me the more difficult part right now is learning how to become self motivated. Going from having my supervisor coaching me in my PhD to being basically totally unsupervised and free to work on what I want in my postdoc has been very difficult both for my work and my mental health. You have to become almost totally self reliant. You start to value and amplify every bit of motivation you get. Discipline doesn’t cut it, because a lot of academic work is impossible to force. There aren’t many mechanical aspects of it, almost all of my work requires a tonne of diverse creative thinking, even just responding to reviewer comments
Back on stupidity, one of my favourites things has become to ask “stupid questions” as a postdoc. Partly because as a postdoc, people just assume you are very smart, so there is no pressure to “look good” or “not say stupid things”. There’s something weirdly liberating about hearing a bunch of very technical questions from PhD students and then me deciding to ask a very basic conceptual question. That said there are “stupid” questions and then there are ignorant ones, and the line is often blurry
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|3 years ago|reply
This was my case during my PhD (physics). My supervisor was not competent enough in my field of studies to help me from a science perspective (I had a co-supervisor who had more information, but not too much - it was a really unique area at that time).
BUT - he was a wonderful, extraordinary person when helping me travel the muddy waters of academia. He was always there to arrange after some, let's say, more "heavy" discussions. I was really delighted to have him as a supervisor.
He also let me roam free in innovative areas, he supported me when I wanted to publish 45 pages of thesis, when the norm was more 200+. He was really, really great.
I started to work in academia during my PhD and he was concerned I would not finish it. I sworn him that I would, before the end of the millenium. I had my defense mid December of the last year :)
I kept on visiting him over the years, presented him my children but he unfortunately died last year. RIP Prof. J.
[+] [-] cycomanic|3 years ago|reply
I would also argue that it really does not take to be a postdoc to ask these questions. Hardly anyone thinks "this was a stupid question".
[+] [-] rob_c|3 years ago|reply
Feeling stupid isn't good, relising you don't know everything and how that doesn't make you stupid is. Especially when you then harness that into driving yourself to learn about whatever that is, childcare, science, politics...
If you start to act like you can do no wrong then you get situations like academics system getting hacked. The IT guys have to deal with the fall-out, and the academic is still demaning that they get full root access to do the same thing all over again despite not learning from the situation.
[+] [-] DrAwdeOccarim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] logifail|3 years ago|reply
My supervisor more or less completely ignored me during my PhD, with hindsight I'm not entirely sure how he got away with it.
[+] [-] jarenmf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|3 years ago|reply
Eh, no. The reality is that there is always a pressure to produce more papers with positive results.
[+] [-] jltsiren|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathias|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ketanmaheshwari|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] withinboredom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
I have to admit though, it took me until about 35 in age to being able to say to myself: “You know, if you don't understand something, it because it’s hard.” Total game changer for my attitude.
Before that I relied a bit on a certain naïveté, as a biologist among physicists I was sometimes called “Stupid biologist”, I guess it helped seeing it as the joke that it probably was for the most part.
[+] [-] JackFr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abirch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vanit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LetThereBeLight|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwoutway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|3 years ago|reply
Most scientists are just "normal" people like everybody else, and are vastly more aware of the difficulty of getting things right in scientific work. Get to know a few of us!
As for the topic of the thread, I think "stupid" might be an extreme term, but every scientist has experienced being wrong about things, over and over again. But it's a different kind of wrong: Being shown that we are wrong by Mother Nature, because we invited her to do so. On the other hand, the only "wrong" that most people outside of science experience is anticipating the wrong side of a choice of humans that is ultimately arbitrary, subjective, or random. The difference is being rationally wrong, rather than being socially wrong, for lack of better terms.
What I think makes prominent scientists seem "arrogant" to the public is that they expect us to behave as if our predictions are ultimately decided subjectively, i.e., to hedge our bets, and to give social encouragement to both "sides" of an issue. We don't give out participation trophies, nor do we ask for them. If I'm wrong about something, I'm not "wrong but tried hard." I'm just plain wrong. I'll be wrong again.
[+] [-] radus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Topolomancer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physicsgraph|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YesThatTom2|3 years ago|reply
“If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called RESEARCH.”
[+] [-] tpoacher|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rob_c|3 years ago|reply
Need I mention the reproducibility crisis, poor funding models, retractions from front-page of nature within the single field...
"Naivete" I can agree with. Stupidity is not and should _never_ be encouraged or endorsed. Even if common use of American English tends to push the meaning of the former onto the latter.
Definitions of words are very important when communicating openly and honestly. This is not an attack on commonly used words in American language, it's an observation. British English (and I assume others) are following suit as America leads the way in "english-speaking" culture. Mixing word definitions is entering into a quasi-mixed up state where people don't know the exact definitions of words which makes difficult good-faith conversation difficult.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply