Attempting to change culture
As always, I enjoy reading what Justin has to say. He is very good at spilling his thoughts onto the keyboard.
Justin is attempting a very ambitious mission in his lab group – changing the culture of people’s minds. It’ll probably be a more difficult task than writing his thesis. His post also makes the lab sound full of miserable people working on projects they don’t want to do.
If there’s one lesson here that can be carried throughout the world, it’s that more time is not proportional to more productivity. Even if you work on something for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, if you’re not motivated you’ll produce something mediocre.
In a knowledge based economy, people have to understand that more time does not mean more work. It’s more important to keep people engaged and interested, otherwise they’ll just clock in the hours and do an effective job of pretending to work.
Unlike what we’re taught in high school, the scientific method comes down to a) a few almost common sense techniques for investigation (also common to good medical diagnoses, detective work, computer programming debugging, and so on), b) keeping attuned to strange, often quite subtle phenomena, and then following them up, which often involves c) developing ingenious tests to cast doubt or confirmation on some idea. b) and c) are actually part of a).
Antibiotics and vaccines have essentially been the Western medical revolution – all the other medical breakthroughs are trivial in comparison. Both of these in the beginning were (relevantly) discovered ‘accidentally’. Most drug applications are discovered accidentally – people are being trialled for one thing, and notice some side-effect that can be turned into another application. Programmatic and bureaucratic scientific programs are a huge waste of resources.