研究生必读：读研让你觉得自己愚蠢吗？看看这篇文章，广受教授们的好评和推荐，解决你对科研的基本认识。 скачать в хорошем качестве

研究生必读：读研让你觉得自己愚蠢吗？看看这篇文章，广受教授们的好评和推荐，解决你对科研的基本认识。

对我们几乎所有人来说，我们在高中和大学时喜欢科学的原因之一是我们擅长它。但这不可能是唯一的原因——对理解物质世界的痴迷以及探索新事物的情感需求肯定也包含在内。不过，高中和大学阶段的理科学习意味着要上课，而课程成绩好意味着在考试中能答对题目。要是你知道那些答案，你就能考得好，进而感觉自己很聪明。 而攻读博士学位就完全不同了，你得做研究项目。对我来说，那是一项艰巨的任务。我怎么可能提出能带来重大发现的问题呢？又该如何设计并解读实验，好让结论绝对令人信服呢？怎样预见困难并找到解决办法？要是做不到这一点，又该如何在困难出现时解决它们呢？我的博士课题有点跨学科，有一阵子，每当我遇到问题，我就会缠着系里在我所需各个学科领域的专家老师们。我还记得有一天，亨利·陶布（注2：Henry Taube，在两年后获得了诺贝尔化学奖）跟我说，他不知道该如何解决我在他专业领域遇到的那个问题。那时我是一名研三学生，我觉得陶布懂的比我多大概1000倍（这还是保守估计）。如果他都没有答案，那就没人知道答案了。 就在那时我恍然大悟：确实没人知道答案。这就是为什么它是个研究难题。既然是我的研究难题，那就得由我来解决。一旦我正视了这个事实，我没过几天就把问题解决了。（其实问题也没那么难，我只是尝试了几种办法而已。）关键的教训是，我所不知道的东西范围不仅很广，实际上，从实际用途来讲，是无穷无尽的。而这一认识，非但没让我气馁，反而让我如释重负。如果我们的无知是无穷的，那唯一可行的做法就是尽力摸索前行。 我想说的是，我们的博士培养项目常常在两个方面对学生不利。首先，我觉得没让学生明白做研究有多难，做重要的研究更是极其困难。这可比上哪怕要求很高的课程都要难得多。困难之处在于，做研究就是要沉浸在未知之中。我们根本不知道自己在做什么，在得到答案或结果之前，我们无法确定自己问的问题是否正确，做的实验是否合适。诚然，科研因争取科研经费以及在顶尖期刊上发表文章的竞争而变得更难了。但抛开这些因素不谈，做有重大意义的研究本身就是很难的，改变系里、机构或者国家的政策也无法降低其内在的难度。 其次，我们在教导学生如何富有成效地“犯傻”方面做得还不够好——也就是说，如果我们没觉得自己蠢，那就意味着我们并没有真正用心去尝试。我这里说的不是“相对愚蠢”，不是那种班上其他同学认真看了书、思考了问题然后考了高分，而你却没做到的情况。我也不是说那些有才华却在不适合自己才能的领域工作的聪明人。科研意味着要直面我们的“绝对愚蠢”。这种愚蠢是一种客观存在的事实，它存在于我们努力探索未知领域的过程中。资格考试和论文答辩的思路是对的——评审委员会会不断追问，直到学生开始答错或者放弃并说“我不知道”。考试的目的不是看学生是否能答对所有问题。如果他们全答对了，那反而是评审老师们没通过考试。考试的目的是找出学生的薄弱环节，一方面看看他们需要在哪些地方下功夫，另一方面看看学生的知识储备是否在足够高的层面上存在欠缺，进而判断他们是否准备好开展研究项目了。 富有成效的愚蠢意味着主动选择无知。聚焦重要问题会让我们陷入无知的尴尬境地。科学的美妙之处在于，它允许我们一次次犯错，磕磕绊绊地前行，只要每次能有所收获，我们就感觉挺好的。毫无疑问，对于习惯了答对问题的学生来说，这可能很难。毫无疑问，适度的自信和较强的情绪适应能力会有所帮助，但我认为科学教育或许可以在缓解这个重大转变方面（译者注：从习惯考试的学生到独立进行科研的博士）多做些工作：从学习别人曾经的发现，到做出自己的发现。我们越能坦然接受自己的愚蠢，就越能深入未知领域，也就越有可能做出重大发现。 For almost all of us, one of the reasons we loved science in high school and college is that we were good at it. But that can’t be the only reason—the fascination with understanding the physical world and the emotional need to explore new things certainly play a role. But science in high school and college meant taking classes, and doing well in classes meant answering questions correctly on tests. If you knew the answers, you did well on the test, and you felt smart. Doing a PhD was completely different. You had to do a research project. For me, that was a daunting task. How could I ask questions that would lead to major discoveries? How could I design and interpret experiments so that the results were absolutely convincing? How could I anticipate difficulties and find solutions? And if I couldn’t do that, how could I solve difficulties when they arose? My PhD project was somewhat interdisciplinary, and for a while, whenever I encountered a problem, I would pester the faculty in the department who were experts in the various disciplines I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry two years later) told me that he didn’t know how to solve a problem I had in his area of ​​expertise. I was a third-year graduate student at the time, and I felt that Taub knew about 1,000 times more than I did (and that was a conservative estimate). If he didn’t have the answer, then nobody knew the answer. That’s when it dawned on me: Nobody did. That’s why it was a research problem. Since it was my research problem, it was mine to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a matter of days. (It wasn’t that hard; I just tried a few approaches.) The key lesson was that the scope of what I didn’t know was not only vast, but actually, for practical purposes, infinite. And this realization, far from discouraging me, was a relief. If our ignorance is infinite, then the only viable course of action is to try to figure it out. I would say that our doctoral programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don’t think students are taught how hard it is to do research, and how hard it is to do important research. It’s harder than taking even the most demanding courses. The difficulty is that doing research is about being immersed in the unknown. We simply don’t know what we’re doing, and we can’t be sure we’re asking the right questions or doing the right experiments until we get answers or results. Granted, research is made harder by the competition for research grants and for publication in top journals. But even without that, doing meaningful research is hard, and changing departmental, institutional, or national policies won’t make it less inherently difficult. Source: The importance of stupidity in scientific research Martin A. Schwartz J Cell Sci (2008) 121 (11): 1771. https://doi.org/10.1242/jcs.033340