{"id":445,"date":"2006-08-01T10:56:42","date_gmt":"2006-08-01T10:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/science-is-tedious\/"},"modified":"2006-08-01T10:56:42","modified_gmt":"2006-08-01T10:56:42","slug":"science-is-tedious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/08\/01\/science-is-tedious\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Is Tedious"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard<\/a> post over the last several days, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about them. In particular, Steinn points out that science is easier than digging ditches<\/a>, while in comments, “revere” of Effect Measure<\/a> says that science is tedious, just like digging ditches<\/a>. Well, OK, that’s flippant– what he really said was:<\/p>\n

\n

The dirty secret we don’t teach our students is that most real research is tedious, time consuming and routine, just like any other kind of work. Whether you think it’s hard or the ride of a lifetime is primarily a matter of attitude.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t disagree with this at all– that’s actually another important point (after “this is not a three-hour lab”) thatb I struggle to get across to students. The work of science isn’t over when you get that first experimental signal– that’s when the real work begins<\/strong>, and it’s just as tedious as the preliminary plugging, what with all the cross-checks and control experiments and sanity checks and stupid little calibration tests that have to be repeated over, and over, and over.<\/p>\n

(Disagreement after the cut.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That’s sort of orthogonal to the point I was trying to address in the earlier post, though, which was Jonah’s question about why there’s so much failure in science<\/a>. Most of our experiments fail not because we don’t care whether they work, or because we’re not good at our jobs, they fail because what we’re trying to do is an inherently difficult thing. All the easy experiments were done a hundred years ago, when they were difficult.<\/p>\n

I think the tedium is another facet of what life in science is about. We place a premium on repeatability, and while we may not spend much time replicating the work of others<\/a>, a big part of the research process is repeating the experiment in-house enough times to be sure that it’s a real effect, and not a temporary glitch, and that’s necessarily sort of tedious. Not to mention the days and weeks of banging away on equipment that stubbornly refuses to behave the way it’s supposed to.<\/p>\n

I happen to think the tedium is worth it for those days when things just work, and you either get the signal you expect, or a completely unexpected and wonderful signal. But I also think this is largely separate from the fact that the goal of original research is actually inherently difficult to achieve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There have been a number of responses to my Science Is Hard post over the last several days, and I’ve been trying to come up with something to say about them. In particular, Steinn points out that science is easier than digging ditches, while in comments, “revere” of Effect Measure says that science is tedious,… Continue reading Science Is Tedious<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}