The importance of being stupid

This is a slight detour from the "thankfulness" posts, to expand on the stupidity/grad school post from yesterday. Maybe I should clarify a few things. (Hopefully this will make you feel better about it, Nicole!)

First, I think the "Impostor syndrome" is most common with in the sciences, specifically those involving a laboratory research component. Not that it doesn't happen in other programs, but it seems to be a consistent trend when you're trying to figure out how to ask meaningful questions about biological systems and then how to go about answering them.

Second, feeling stupid is a good thing! Hard to deal with at times, but good. I like this quote from Winston Churchill: "Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught." For me, I think its a pride issue. It still creeps up often, but now that I know what it is, I'm better able to combat it. It's a challenge to be comfortable with feeling stupid and going beyond that, to be comfortable enough to ask the questions you're thinking regardless of if you think they're stupid or not.

There was an editorial in the Journal of Cell Science last spring entitled "The importance of stupidity in scientific research." (Schwartz, 2008) Here are a few excerpts from it (emphasis added).

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.
...
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.

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Schwartz, M. A. (2008). "The importance of stupidity in scientific research." Journal of Cell Science 121: 1771.