Blundering toward productivity, Part 4: cranks, evolution, and humility

If you're new to this series, you might like to read the previous installments first: here they are.

It's pretty common for internet cranks in general, and absolutely pandemic for dinosaur cranks in particular, to argue that Ivory Tower so-called experts are all blinkered by orthodoxy and that outsiders with no technical training are better suited to having the big ideas because they are unshackled by the weight of knowing all that has gone before. These people are almost always wrong, because they keep reinventing the wheel, and the wheels they reinvent are often square. That's why I was careful to specify in Part 3 that you hang out with people who are not afraid to look stupid (check) but also know enough to make useful suggestions.

The advantage of collaborating with friends is that neither of you mind the occasional stupid comment on either side; laughing those off and going on is worth it for all the good ideas that you'll have that you wouldn't have had otherwise. The disadvantages of listening to cranks are that the ratio of good ideas to stupid comments is very low, that cranks almost always mistake the latter for the former, and that almost by definition cranks are immune to being corrected (if they were willing to accept logic, reason, and the weight of evidence, they wouldn't be cranks). Even if you could somehow engineer a polite crank, who would immediately and humbly accept being corrected when he was wrong, you'd still waste most of your time explaining entry-level stuff and never get to the really good questions.

Although in retrospect Mike and I did a lot of this when we were first friends; he didn't know any biology to speak of but had a decent command of math and logic, and I knew a little biology but had never really been schooled in how to think clearly, and we both kind of helped each other up (i.e., took turns smacking each other down) until the conversations we were having anyway started to be applicable to exciting and tractable problems. So if you are an expert you shouldn't waste any time on a crank unless that crank is both potentially remediable and also your friend, and if you're a crank (or any other variety of n00b), learn how to swallow your pride, find a friend who can do likewise, and start climbing together. Maybe that is the definition of a crank: a n00b who mistakes himself for an expert.

It's not that cranks don't know a lot of facts. Usually, they know too many facts; they are blinded by their own command of the esoterica of the field in which they are cranks. The problem is that their command of that esoterica does not automatically mean that they are capable of thinking clearly about it; usually the opposite is true. After several bitter years of realizing how muddled is my own thinking, I now think that everyone, without exception, could stand to improve the clarity of their thought, and that the surest sign of this is thinking that you already think well enough.

This is like Richard Dawkins's definition of evolution as "the one subject that everyone thinks they understand." If you think you understand evolution, you don't understand it, and the more certain you are, the more grave your misunderstanding. Nor is evolution special: I suspect that this is true of any sufficiently rich field. That doesn't mean that there aren't lots of things that we know about evolution, like the fact that is has happened and continues to happen. It just means that we haven't solved it, in terms of reducing the whole field to anything that can be grasped in a blog post, or a lecture, or a documentary series, or a book, or even a career. Saying you understand evolution is not like saying you understand orbital motion, it's more like saying you understand physics. All of it. The term 'evolutionary biology' is a misnomer: evolution isn't an aspect of a more inclusive phenomenon called biology, biology is an instance of a more inclusive phenomenon called evolution.

The partner of useful stupidity is humility. In Part 2 I mentioned two aspects of humility: letting your guard down enough to let out the good ideas will probably let out some dumb ideas at the same time, and sometimes your dumb ideas will trigger someone else's good ideas. Here I am talking about another, deeper level of humility. Not humility in front of another person, but humility before the universe itself. Recognizing that any commonplace object or idea that you take for granted probably stands at the end of an almost impossibly long series of unlikelihoods, most of which have never been explored. Stephen Jay Gould seemed to have a knack for asking questions that most of his colleagues could not even have formulated; he was really good at not just seeing the box and then thinking outside of it, but wondering what it was doing there in the first place. I wonder if he was a biological evolutionist rather than an evolutionary biologist; I suppose Dawkins must be. Too bad they were always at odds (when Gould was still alive), I'll bet they would have had some killer ideas if they could have ever let their guards down around each other.

In any case, this is another way to quickly separate serious cranks from potentially remediable n00bs: cranks lack humility. Not just humility toward other people, but toward the universe. The true crank is beset by the dual delusions that the answers are all straightforward, and that he has them and no one else does (except maybe one or two of his fellow cranks; sometimes they run in packs). Look around for someone who doubts if we're even asking the right questions, and chat that person up instead. Not just instead of talking to the crank--instead of doing whatever it was you had planned for the rest of the day.

Where am I going with all of this? I have no clue. I just intended to write a little bit about e-mail and the value of conversation. And I'm not going to find out tonight, because right now my need for sleep is greater than my curiosity to see what comes next. Stay tuned, though. I'm probably stupid enough to bring this to a satisfactory close, but it remains to be seen if I have the humility.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 3: smart enough to feel stupid

Part 1 is about goofing off as the spawning ground of good ideas. Part 2 is ostensibly about whether the goofing off part can be circumvented, but really about the value of working with smart people who aren't afraid to look stupid. In this post, I answer the second question from Part 1: how can the process of turning undirected play into good ideas be accelerated?

The obvious answer, which I intended to write about: have a workshop, get a bunch of smart people from different but interacting disciplines together, and give them time to educate each other AND time to freewheel. I got to experience this for real at the sauropod workshop in Germany last November (see here and here). The importance of this is not to be underestimated. This is why we talk about particular institutions having a "critical mass" of workers in a field, and it's why Berkeley was such a fun and inspiring place to be a grad student.

Another answer, which I discovered in the course of writing the previous post: hang out with smart people who you are not afraid to look stupid in front of, and who are not afraid to look stupid in front of you. This is harder than it sounds, because people who know enough to make worthwhile suggestions are prone to being at least a little bit insecure or defensive about their knowledge, especially compared to others. I would be horrible collaborator with many people in my field because I would never let my guard down; it would kill me if they found out how stupid I am capable of being.

Given that, a further suggestion would be to consider collaborating with your best friends regardless of what they work on; by being vulnerably, stupidly open with each other, you might have enough good ideas fast enough to either find something midway between your specialties, or for one or the other of you to fall in love with a problem in the other person's field. Hence the project on rabbit heads with Brian. I wasn't particularly interested in rabbit heads but I am interested in pneumaticity and we figured the project would be about rabbit sinuses. It turns out we're going to do something completely different and much more interesting, which was not on the radar for either of us because neither of us had made the necessary discoveries (you would call them observations, but for us they were discoveries), which has roots in some papers we read back at Berkeley but really germinated in the soil of undirected conversation.

And this accounts for the feeling that I had when I started this essay, that time spent chatting on e-mail is not always a waste of time. Sometimes it's not just productive time, it's the most productive time it's possible to have. Because it is the spawning ground of new ideas.

Chatting on e-mail with distant colleagues is better than exchanging snail-mail letters or not talking, but it's still vastly inferior to meeting in person. In the past year I have spent just over a month with Mike (one evening in LA last summer, two weeks at his house in August, two weeks in Germany in November, one day at the AMNH last month), but out of that month we've gotten two manuscripts mostly written and plans made for at least half a dozen more. A couple we had sketched out on e-mail, but most of them wouldn't exist even in concept if we hadn't had some time to just hang out with fossils. I suppose that is another potential idea-accelerator to add to the list:

(1) have lots of wide-ranging conversations
(2) don't be afraid to look stupid
(3) collaborate with your best friends
(4) in person as often as possible
(5) with the objects of your investigations at hand

If you're an astronomer and there is a physicist you'd like to work with, meet up at the observatory or the cyclotron or more likely the computer lab where you play with your data. If you're a paleontologist or zoologist, go on field trips and museum visits with your collaborators. Happily, that's probably something you were going to anyway. But now you know it's not just a convenience, it's a necessity. And having a few beers together at the end of the day is not a waste of time, it's an investment in your joint idea bank.

The other implication of this last one is that if you are on your own and you've got some time to kill, you should probably go to where your potential data is and just let your mind and body wander. There is a great bit in one of David Quammen's essays in which Quammen is roaming the Montana State University library and he comes across Jack Horner sitting on the floor between two rows of shelves with journals spread out all around him. Quammen says, "Hey, Jack, what are you doing here?" Horner looks up and says, "Having ideas." The best part is that the journals weren't even paleo journals, they were ornithology journals.

That's yet another important point: it's good to have at least a nodding acquaintance with every field that bears on yours. Which, depending on how broadly you think, might be all of them. And what's more, you should get more than a nodding acquaintance with the ones that are likely to be most important. Birds are living dinosaurs, so if you are looking for new ideas to test about dinosaur biology, it makes sense to camp out in the ornithology section. Crocs are also relevant and elephants are not completely irrelevant, but people have been thinking about dinosaurs as big crocs and slow elephants for a long time. The MSU library run-in happened in the early 90s, when the idea of dinosaurs as stem birds had not yet penetrated paleobiological thought (it still hasn't, fully). Even now, if you were looking to really push things, it would be a good idea.

The downside of jumping into a new field instead of just soaking your toes at the shallow end is that it will make you feel stupid. It doesn't matter what line of work you're in, whether it's paleontology or programming or construction, there is something that you are an expert on now that you weren't when you started, whether it is taphonomy or recursive subroutines or knocking down walls. But you weren't an expert when you started, and when you started you probably spent a lot of time feeling stupid. But you learned quickly, partly because you were anxious to get past feeling stupid, and partly because trying dumb stuff is a good way to learn what works and what doesn't.

I am starting to think that becoming an expert can be dangerous, because feeling smart feels better than feeling stupid, and the risk inherent in expertise is that you stay put and never push the field as much as you might by taking a risk, feeling stupid for a while, and mastering another body of knowledge.

I almost hesitate to say that here on teh intert00bz, where it is often alleged that becoming an expert is dangerous for another reason, which leads to the hopefully non-trivial discussion of cranks in the next post.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 2: is there a better way to have good ideas?

In Part 1 I discussed the fact that, in my experience at least, good ideas almost always arise from undirected conversations with friends and colleagues (e.g., goofing off). I ended the post by wondering whether this process can be circumvented or accelerated. This post is about the first of those alternatives: is there another way to have good ideas other than gabbing with informed friends?

I doubt it. Mike and I have both noticed that on museum research visits we get a lot more done if we're working with someone else than if we're working alone. And usually that is not because we are sharing the load, like one person taking measurements and the other writing them down. It's because we just notice more and ask more questions.

The corollary is make sure you work with the right person. A good collaborator is curious, open-minded, and not afraid to look stupid. When I'm really in the zone on a collaborative project, I say all kinds of stupid things, and frequently have to be reminded of the obvious. And I am lenient when my collaborators say dumb things, because there is more than one kind of dumb statement. We're so used to dumb statements that indicate that someone is not thinking at all that it is hard to realize that sometimes dumb statements mean that someone is thinking very hard. So hard that they can't be bothered to remember little details like gravity or the fact that necks must necessarily have a head at one end and a body at the other.

Well, why not just guard your inner monologue and not let the stupid stuff out? Because that's what you do for the rest of your time, and because that filter that you set up to catch the stupid stuff might also catch the really brilliant stuff. At the very least, it will slow down the flow. There is some necessary humility here. Not just the humility to not be afraid to look stupid, but also the humility to realize that you are not going to get to all the good ideas yourself, and even your wrong or dumb ideas might jar something loose in your collaborator's head.

Hmm. I have read that you write reports when you have found answers that need sharing, and you write essays to find answers in the first place, and sometimes to questions you didn't know you were asking. I started this section thinking that I was just going to write glowingly about the value of batting ideas around with someone else. But I think I am coming to the view that openness, verging on stupidity, is not only necessary, but also the answer to the next question.

For another recent defense of stupidity as a crucial part of science, go here, and please note that the linked paper is free.

Blundering toward productivity, Part 1: e-mail and goofing off

Another post inspired by someone else's post. Scott Aaronson recently crossed the E-mail Event Horizon, and sent a report from inside.

I have not crossed the EEH, but I have been through brief e-mail storms, during which I have spent an entire working day doing nothing but answering e-mails that can't be put off. Now, when I was a grad student I sometimes blew a whole day goofing off on e-mail, but that was different. Mostly, though, I am able to plow through necessary e-mail in about an hour and get down to the day's work. Although it is still kinda shocking that, on average, I spend an eighth of my workday checking and answering e-mail. On the other hand, there is no question that e-mail is a huge productivity booster overall, at least for me, because it circumvents so many meetings and vastly accelerates the pace of collaborative research and writing.

It is easy to get carried away and let a focused e-mail exchange with a colleague metastasize into a rambling conversation with a friend. Sometimes that eats up whole mornings. That used to bother me, but not so much these days. At least part of that 'virtual community' BS is true. In a traditional office I would be having water-cooler conversations with whatever chumps I happened to be stuck with. Thanks to e-mail, I can have those conversations with a distributed network of my favorite people, many of whom are not in the same town, or the same state, or even the same continent.

I had a minor epiphany on my recent research trip to the AMNH. I was hanging out with Brian Kraatz and we were kicking around ideas for a project on rabbit skulls (yes, really). To an outside observer, it would have looked like the Real Work/Goofing Off split was about 20/80. But the ideas that we ended up chasing all came out of what would have looked like goofing off.

I had a similar experience when I was visiting Mike in England in August. We'd usually end each day at the dining room table, playing games and just freewheeling. One night we got to talking about sauropod vertebrae (gasp!) and some things that do not make sense, and after we'd scribbled up two or three pages of scrap paper with notes and diagrams we looked at each other and thought, "Hey, this could be a paper." It's in review right now; I'll let you know if it ever sees print.

The epiphany I had in New York is not that good research ideas sometimes emerge from the most apparantly random conversations. It's that they almost always do. This is nothing new--when I look back, the guts of most of my papers started out as a few motes of inspiration distilled from undirected yakk sessions with friends and colleagues. When I was just starting out with undergrad research, I'd meet with Rich Cifelli in his office and we'd just bat ideas back and forth. This turns out to be a good way not just to have new ideas but to make new observations. Rich and I figured out a lot of sauropod morphology because one of us would point at some feature and say, "That's weird. Is it always like that?" and then we'd go check. Same thing with Brian and the bunny heads in New York.

So far this is all pedestrian. What I'm really curious about is, can this process be (1) circumvented, or (2) accelerated?