Timidity Does Not Pay Either

In the last post, I talked about the risk one takes when they venture out on their own, following their own curiosity, in their research. Not going along with the crowd is a high risk, high reward situation. It is high risk because you might find that you have just wasted your time. It is high reward, because, if you are successful, you may get your name associated with something. This may sound like I am recommending that one go along with the pack. I am not. There are risks there as well.

If one follows the path of well defined research, there are risks and rewards as there are with anything. The reward may be that you are the one to find the thing that everyone is looking for. But, that reward may not be so great and the risks are not trivial. Consider the following analogy. Let's say that pirates buried treasure somewhere along a stretch of beach several miles long. If enough people scour the beach with metal detectors, somebody will be he person lucky enough to find it. What will that person get credit for? They will get credit for being the lucky one. That's it, and they may not even be able to keep the treasure.

How different is this from someone who studied old maps, read old ship logs and then determined where the treasure would likely be. And then, before actually looking for the treasure, they acquired salvage rights. The risk with this approach is that after all that work they may not find anything. But, if they do, they get prestige, recognition and mostly likely can keep the treasure. This is analogous to the situation I described last week. But let us return to the beach full of beachcombers with metal detectors.

The person who finds the treasure with a metal detector is not likely to gain the prestige and respect that the person who predicted its location would. The beachcomber would be seen as a technician who was merely applying their technique and got lucky. So, one of the risks associated with going along with the pack is that you may be seen merely as a technician. One of the hallmarks of lack luster research is that it is technically solid, means little and contributes less.

This disdain for the technician goes a long way back in the history of science. In fact, that is where the word 'science' came from. Prior to the mid 1800's what we currently call science was known as natural philosophy. As more and more people began to focus on data collection and less on the larger problems to be solved, natural philosophers began to chafe at the idea of having these people included in their ranks. So, around mid century William Whewell suggested the term 'scientist' (from the Latin word for knowledge) to refer to these technicians of knowledge acquisition who did not live up to the full meaning of natural philosopher. Today, of course, the term scientist is used as a term of respect rather than disdain. But it reflects the prevailing view that technicians somehow fall short of the mark.

If one is too far embedded in the current paradigm they risk being considered as little more than a technician. And, like the beachcomber who got lucky, they are unlikely to get full credit for whatever they discover. Is being a technician the only risk associated with going along with the crowd. No, not at all. It may be that the whole crowd is looking on the wrong beach. And that we will consider next.