Ignorance and failure are key to success in science, says neuroscientist

June 22, 2022

Robert

Neuroscientist Stuart Firestein has long held a counterintuitive idea: that ignorance and failure are fundamental to scientific progress.

And it’s not that I say it out of the box. In 2006, he created a course called “Ignorance” at Columbia University (USA), where he chairs the Department of Biological Sciences and teaches neuroscience. In 2012, he released a book with the same name (published in Brazil in 2019 by Companhia das Letras).

At a time when populist politicians seek to undermine the credibility of science, however, one caveat is in order. “The name of the course is just to be provocative. It’s not about stupidity, about indifference to facts”, says Firestein.

The proposal, he explains, is to show which are the big questions that scientists try to answer, presenting more doubts and uncertainties and less facts and data. “Because we’re not going to get the data we want if we don’t ask the right question,” he says.

Firestein advocates changes in the way science is taught throughout formal education, from school to college, where, according to him, a deterministic view typical of the 19th century still prevails.

He also argues that better scientific communication with the public is needed, a topic that he began to research in partnership with Brazilian scientist Natália Pasternak.

The two will hold the opening conference of the 2022 season of Fronteiras do Pensamento, with presentations on August 8th in São Paulo, August 10th in Porto Alegre and online from August 19th.

like mr. come to the idea that it is ignorance, not knowledge, that drives science? It was from my dual role at Columbia University. I realized that in the neuroscience lab, I found it very exciting to interact with graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, as well as think about the experiments and the big questions we were raising.

But I’m also a professor of an undergraduate course where you use a textbook weighing more than 3 kg, that is, more than twice the weight of the human brain. And I started to think that over the course of the 23 classes, students imagined that everything they needed to know about the brain was in that book and the facts I kept quoting. But this is far from the case.

Also, I felt that students thought that all a scientist does is produce all these facts to put them together in a textbook and then force students to memorize them before the exam. But that is not the case either.

When I meet with other scientists, we don’t talk about what we know. We talk about the big issues and how we’re going to tackle them.

When I realized this disconnect between the way science is perceived and the way science is pursued, I thought, “What are we teaching students?” We’re not teaching what’s exciting about science. And so I thought we should teach the things that we don’t know, because that’s what science is all about.

The name of the course, “ignorance”, is just meant to be provocative. It’s not about stupidity, about indifference to facts. The idea is, with the collaboration of other faculty members, to show what they are working on, what are the major issues in their areas, why they choose these issues and not those issues, etc.

If science were perceived the way Mr. says she’s persecuted, what difference would it make? It would be much more accessible to the general public, an audience that might feel that science is an invincible mountain of facts and data. Of course, to be a scientist, you have to learn a lot. But you also have to learn a lot to become a lawyer, a plumber, a musician.

But you don’t have to be a professional musician to enjoy a symphony or a show. So why would you need it with science? Why can’t people enjoy the fabulous adventure of science? Everyone likes a puzzle, an open question.

Mr. says in his book that it is a mistake to place so much emphasis on results in science. Because of the pandemic, however, people were more anxious than ever to know the results of research on vaccines, the coronavirus, etc. Could it be different? I have nothing against facts and data. I’m just looking for a better balance in the way we think about science. After all, in the laboratory, we examine the facts very carefully, but, in many cases, the most important part is the framing of a given issue. Because we’re not going to get the data we want if we don’t ask the right question.

So one thing that might work best in communicating with the public is showing not only what we know but also what we don’t know and what we’re trying to find out.

And the pandemic made the scientific process very evident, because researchers from the most different areas stopped what they were doing to try to contribute. There was data sharing like we had never seen before, and in many cases with incompatible data.

But that’s how science advances, and not like in the historical narratives where one genius after another makes the great discoveries. Mistakes are made, scientists run into dead ends; but failures are very important for success.

A large part of this collaboration in the pandemic has taken place through social media. like mr. see this performance of scientists? Communication with the public is essential. Science locked away in the laboratory is science lost to society. But should all scientists be involved in communicating with the public? Probably not. There is no reason to imagine that a good scientist is necessarily also good at lecturing, writing or teaching, for example.

How to deal with people who distort the role of doubt in science, making it not a step in the process of finding answers, but a supposed sign of weakness? This is a complicated question, and of course there is no simple answer. But I think it goes through the science education we give people. We continue to teach a deterministic view of science typical of the 19th century. And this from school to college. We continue to teach facts and formulas, but we do not teach uncertainty.

When a person finishes his formal education, the experience he has with science is that there are right and wrong answers on the test. So when a scientist says that he is not right about a subject, or that there are different opinions, that person thinks that it is not science, because he has never learned that uncertainty is part of the process.

Could artificial intelligence help change the way science is taught? One would expect artificial intelligence to at least take the pressure off the facts. Google and Wikipedia partly already do this. Anything that leads to abandoning the idea that we have to keep a lot of facts in our heads can help improve education, if used properly.

One thing that worries me about education is that there have been good proposals for reform since a century ago, but nothing happens. It’s because? I think one of the biggest hurdles is evaluation. We need to be able to evaluate both the student and the course he takes.

It’s just that we still use the same instruments we always use, like standardized tests. It’s what I call the bulimic model of teaching: we shove a bunch of facts down the student’s throat, he spews it all up on a test, and then moves on to the next year, with no appreciable gain from doing everything right.

Artificial intelligence could offer a solution by suggesting ways to assess students individually. Today we know that people don’t learn things at the same pace. A person can advance faster in math than in writing at basic levels, for example, and then reverse at intermediate or advanced levels.

So why are all students in each grade the same age? Well, because it’s easier from an administrative point of view, but that’s a bad reason.

What would be the alternative? I think about video games. The player needs to collect certain points to pass the level. One player might go really fast from phase 1 to 5 and then get stuck in phase 6. Another might start out slow, but once they get the hang of it, they move through the phase very easily. It’s an individual way of evolving in the game, and education could learn something from that.

To get into the spirit of your book, over the last ten years, what was the most interesting thing that Mr. learned that you don’t know about ignorance? This is interesting (laughs). I would say that one thing I learned later about ignorance concerns the things we don’t even know that we don’t know. How did we get to these things? This is a kind of deep ignorance.

So I started to think about it and, partly because of that, I wrote the book “Failure” [fracasso, sem tradução em português, publicado em 2015]: it is through failure that we arrive at these things. That is, we must not only embrace ignorance but also failure, because failure shows us things we didn’t even know we didn’t know.

You do an experiment expecting a certain result, but the experiment fails or has an outcome you don’t understand. Well, now you need to think all over again and devise new experiments to understand what happened. Great discoveries were made in this way.

X-ray

Stuart Firestein

President of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University (USA), where he researches the sense of smell, teaches neuroscience and coordinates a course on ignorance. He is the author of “Ignorância – Como Ela Impula a Ciência” (Companhia das Letras, 2019) and “Failure – Why Science Is So Successful” (failure – because science is so successful, not yet published in Brazil). Before starting his scientific career at age 40, he worked in theater for nearly two decades.