Science is boring!
December 30, 2009 – 10:24 amInteresting confluence of views from today’s feeds:
Let’s face it, science is boring – science-in-society – 21 December 2009 – New Scientist
“Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.”
Medical Hypotheses: Why are modern scientists so dull?
“How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity”
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2 Responses to “Science is boring!”
Good links. I’m slowly rereading Kuhn’s classic Structure of Scientific Revolutions; his ideas about “normal” and revolutionary science are certainly relevant here. Science generates a lot of beans, and those who like to count them will find opportunities more than ample.
I think it’s interesting how the second article pushes IQ as an indicator of creativity, given that the creativity psych literature I’m familiar with has found limited association. And I question Charlton’s contention that the domination of science by head-down plodders is a new thing; most science has always been normal science, which requires this sort of terrier mindset.
Most importantly, if science education is washing out un-persistent geniuses, good! Science is not sudoku. Sure, the revolutionaries of the field were smart–but they also spent years in near-fanatical devotion to the mundane, grungy, painstaking work of the lab (or telescope, or whatever) and notebook.
By Jason Priem on Jan 25, 2010
Also: I saw Charlton, the author of the “why are scientists so boring” article, mentioned elsewhere recently.Discover Blog did a whole series on his rather unusual corpus (most of his articles have been published in Medical Hypothesis, of which he is the editor). http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/category/ncbi-rofl/charlton-week/ Some wacky stuff.
By Jason Priem on Feb 5, 2010