From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Subject: Scientific research.  
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Summary: There's more to science than publishable results.  
Keywords: NLP NeuroLinguistic Programming
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)
Distribution: sci
Date: Sun, 12 Apr 1992 19:15:56 GMT

As I'm sure many of you have heard, Isaac Asimov died recently.  Until a 
few months before his death, he wrote a monthly science column for the 
magazine Fantasy & Science Fiction.  I often wished I knew a way to 
encourage the readers of sci.psychology to read his column, because it gave 
an excellent historial perspective on the way scientific progress actually 
arises, as opposed to the myths we teach in graduate school.  Now, in the 
May issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction there is an article by the 
physicist/science fiction writer Greg Benford giving a more modern insight 
into the reality of scientific activity as opposed to the myth.  

In every class I teach I try to sometime remember to tell my students 
that I am presenting a lie.  A favorable teaching evaluation might say "He 
makes it all really clear" and that is what I try to do (often far from 
successfully :-). )  But "making it really clear" can sometimes be a 
disservice to students, because they go away thinking "I could never think 
like that" -- because I have not shared with them the reality of the hours 
and somedays days or years spent working and reworking material to 
the point that it can be presented on the board in ten minutes and 
made to seem obvious.  

There's an anecdote that when John von Neumann first came to the Institue 
for Advanced Study in Princeton in the forties (I guess) he hired a maid.  
And someone asked the maid what it was like working for the famous 
mathematician.  Her answer was, "He's a fine person.  Just a little strange. 
All day he sits at his desk and scribbles, scribbles, scribbles.  Then, 
at the end of the day...  he scrunches up all those pieces of paper he's 
been scribbling on all day and throws them all away!"  

That's the reality of doing science.  In our graduate courses we teach the 
myth -- that science is neat, organized, rigorous.  Yes, the final product 
should have those properties.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg, the 
end result of a lot of activity that's very unneat, disorganized, and 
not rigorous.  First off, there's the very crucial and subjective decision 
as to what questions to investigate and which ones not to.  In my opinion, 
it is almost always the decision at this level that makes the difference 
between great science and mediocre science.  

And the one rule that is paramount in deciding what questions to investigate 
is...  We investigate the questions which we know how to and do not 
investigate the ones we don't know how to.  This is a trivial 
observation, but I think it's important for scientists not to start believing 
their own bullshit and thinking that the topics on which research is done 
are the ones which have the most intrinsic significance.  

Whenever we get into these arguments about NLP it seems impossible to break 
through this attitude that only the scientific bottom line matters, that only 
the tip of the scientific iceberg is important.  Over and over again, when 
I try to explain that something is *interesting* the same response comes 
back:  "Your opinions and your personal experiences are not evidence."  Shit, 
man, I know they're not evidence.  I'm not claiming that I'm presenting a 
neat, rigorous, and organized piece of science worthy of being published 
in a refereed journal.  I'm trying to direct your attention to an area 
where there is something interesting, an opportunity for research.  

Every once in a while, the thought occurs to me that almost all academic 
research (except one's own, of course!) exists primarily as a form of busy 
work to keep scientists occupied.  

I used to think that this failure of vision, this inclination to continually 
pursue minor refinements of existing lines of research instead of looking for 
significant new areas to investigate, and the inability to see beyond the 
scientific bottom line... was a result of the pressures of the 
academic world.  And to a large extent I still believe that.  

In principle, the ivory tower idea sounds great:  Free scientists from the 
pressure of having to produce commercially useful results so that they can 
work on questions which are really important.  The only thing is, the 
pressure to produce publishable papers proves to be even more insidious.  
The primary consideration in choosing what to investigate becomes having 
a fair assurance that one will be able to get publishable results fairly 
quickly.  

But now it occurs to me that another factor in this tendency to play it 
safe scientifically may be the lie that we present when we teach science.  
We are so busy being neat, rigorous, and organized in our teaching that we 
never have time to tell students about all the wild speculation, and all 
the mistakes and blind alleys and the bullheaded stubborness that real 
scientific progress has always come out of.  

What is so amazing to me in these discussions in sci.psychology is the
lack of *curiosity* on the part of scientists.  The idea of looking
into a subject for the purpose of learning something, of increasing
one's understanding and insight without necessarily getting a
publication out of it... seems to have become hopelessly old
fashioned.  It seems that back at the time when the scientists we now
venerate were wild and crazy kids, sometimes doing incredibly risky
things and outraging their scientific elders by their disrespect for
established methodology...  it seems that if one told one of those
scientists about something very remarkable he might have said "That
seems very strange to me.  I don't think that should happen.  I think
I'll try that out myself."

Whereas now, at least in sci.psychology, when one tries to tell people about 
something remarkable psychologists fall all over each other trying to
explain why they don't need to have any interest in it.

There's an anecdote about the Indian number theorist Ramanujan.  While he 
was in the hospital he was visited by his friend and colleague G H Hardy, 
who remarked that the cab he had come in had the number 1729, which Hardy 
thought was an exceedingly uninteresting number.  And, as Hardy tells it, 
Ramanujan immediately replied "Not at all, my dear Hardy.  1729 is an 
extremely interesting number, being the smallest number which is the sum 
of two cubes in two different ways."  (1729 is 10 cubed plus 9 cubed 
and is also 12 cubed plus 1 cubed.)  

I wonder how the denizens of sci.psychology would have replied to this.  
"It's anecdotal/idiosyncratic.  It's statistically insignificant.  It 
should just be thrown out as a data point.  Almost no numbers are sums of 
cubes in more than one way, so it's of no real value.  It's a questionable 
claim because there was no control group.  It was not published in a 
refereed journal." 

--
Lee Lady                                               
Dept of Mathematics                      lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu   
University of Hawaii                     lady@uhunix.bitnet
Honolulu, HI  96822