
Mistakes I Have Made in My Research Career - whatami
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mistakes-i-have-made-my-research-career-fundaci%C3%B3n-alicia-koplowitz
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317070
> If I had the chance to have a second career, I would try harder not to
> follow of the fashion of the herd.

As a fellow researcher, I would question you get to have a second career
following his advice. I wonder if he would be standing there giving this
advice as a senior researcher, if he would have followed it himself.

I agree that it would probably be more useful for science, but from what I
observe, it does not help in the current scientific environment. Scientific
funding is a dog eat dog world.

~~~
danieltillett
Exactly. All the young researchers that didn’t follow the herd never got
funding and never got tenure.

When I was an academic I tried to follow a middle path. 75% herd following
(more accurately arbitrage exploitation taking advantage that certain fields
lag others so applying something old from one field is seen as cutting edge in
another), 25% high risk. I would have loved to have spent more time on the
high risk activities, but it is just too risky.

We really, really, really, really need to change the way science is funded.
Not more funding, smarter funding. We get exactly the results we should expect
from the totally stupid way science is funded.

/s I have a totally novel idea - how about we use science to determine how
science funding should be allocated. /s

~~~
kovek
On that /s, do you know if there has been research done on what the smartest
way to do funding would be? How could I find reputable resources discussing
this idea?

~~~
sndean
There's some research. Most of it simply says "we're really bad at this." [0].
One way to fix it is to use a sort of lottery [1].

[0]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11335.abstract](http://www.pnas.org/content/112/36/11335.abstract)

[1]
[http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16.abstract](http://mbio.asm.org/content/7/2/e00422-16.abstract)

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harveywi
>If I had the chance to have a second career, I would try harder not to follow
of the fashion of the herd. The mistakes I have made, at least those into
which I have insight, have usually resulted from adhering excessively to the
prevailing orthodoxy.

So much of being a professional researcher these days requires one to not
upset the apple cart.

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timdellinger
One of the perils of research is that we can be wrong in ways that play out on
five and ten year time scales.

"We" includes the funding agencies, the prevailing theories of the day, the
ways that our institutions are structured, and the individual researchers
themselves.

Failure occurs at all length scales: minutes, hours, days, years, decades.

A failure isn't necessarily a mistake.

It's nice to hear the anecdote, though! So often the only things we hear about
science are the successes.

~~~
gt_
No. Your platitude here is only dangerous. The collective mind moves in terms
of generations while the free mind moves in terms of days.

The function of research is to discover new knowledge, a task often dependent
on questioning old knowledge. Worse, when collective operations favor
collective mindedness, they are obstructing research by displacing open
mindedness.

The post is a valuable recollection that should be internalized at any
expense.

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ordu
_> If I had the chance to have a second career, I would try harder not to
follow of the fashion of the herd. The mistakes I have made, at least those
into which I have insight, have usually resulted from adhering excessively to
the prevailing orthodoxy._

I would rather say, that researcher needs to train himself to start with
completely neutral attitude to any new idea. Sometimes even old idea deserves
to be examined from scratch. This needs a very specific skill to shut off
existing beliefs and to start from blank page.

It is all bayesian. You get new proposition, assign 0.5 likelyhood to it, and
then you start thinking. While you think you must be ready to reject any idea
regardless of its plausibility, if such a rejection allow to see things from
new angle. Probably it will lead to some kind of contradiction, but you might
not know it a priori, so the only way to be sure is to try it.

All this test rejections should be done systematically and consiously. Or you
need to be a genius to do it intuitively in right circumstances.

It needs training, and the best training I know is to learn how to agree with
anyone. One need to learn how to understand point of view of other person and
to look from that point of view. I'm really surprised, that psychiatrist can
make mistakes of not accepting some ideas before taking a close look at them.
I tend to believe that ability to understand any point of view, even delirium
one, is the key tool for psychiatrist.

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sneilan
It sounds like he had a really successful career.

~~~
sulizilxia
Robin Murray is a pretty well-respected psychiatric researcher. This was
interesting for me to read.

