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Saturday, February 1, 2020

Book Review-Failure by Stuart Firestein.


I had read Stuart Firestein’s previous book: Ignorance. It was well written, well argued, and tempered with anger about where the sciences are at this moment in history. It struck a chord with me because the book spoke out fiercely against the prevailing psyche in academia, something that was derived by the need to publish or perish. The author made a very strong point about how this aversion is destroying the fundamentals of research and pursuit of new knowledge as well as compromise the integrity of everyone involved in science.

Indeed, Prof. Firestein is reiterating his point in this follow up. He expresses the thought that it is an absolute imperative for scientists and technologists to commit to rigorously accepting and examining our failures; he admonishes us to actively seek opportunities to create failures, and he proclaims that it is the failures that will fuel our innovation engines.

Prof. Firestein cogently argues in fifteen succinct chapters why we must seek out failures.
In those fifteen chapters, he makes the case for taking more chances, and experiencing failure. He is able to layout a very convincing case that not only is failure something from which we need to learn from; indeed, failure is something that we absolutely need to demand of our researchers and scientists in order to make advances in science.  

He makes his case mostly in the pharmacological and biological world since that is his milieu in the sciences, but the knowledge and the lessons that he provides us are general in nature. The advices are something that could be applied to both applied and pure research and for things that are far broader than just the biological world.

In Chapter One, Prof. Firestein lays out the case that we are terrible at defining what failure is because of the negative nature of the word failure. He cites Gertrude Stein’s quote: “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end of itself.”  The quote concisely defines the bad failures, the stupid silly kinds that we all do because we were negligent, and those failures that lead us somewhere interesting. The latter are the ones that we need to talk about, the ones that piques our interest, pushes and allows us to investigate further, ask better questions. Those are the ones that. that reveal surprising questions and/or gives us a chance to re-evaluate our assumptions, understanding, and biases.  

In Chapter Two, he discusses the meaning of Samuel Beckett’s famous quote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” Prof. Firestein goes into detail on what he thinks Fail Better means and he discusses what he thinks what we should do to Fail Better. This chapter was the one that really hooked me onto this book because I've always been fascinated by Beckett's quote. I hadn't really thought about what failing better meant until I read Prof. Firestein’s arguments. It clarified some of my thoughts on the subject, so kudos to him for allowing me to think about it and leading me to a clear definition of failing better.

In Chapters 3 and 8 Prof. Firestein goes after the scientific method. He takes out the scalpel and dissects the whole idea of how we do science, or the official written way we are supposed to do science.  His willingness to take on the mythology of the scientific method, which turned him into an apostate to the temple of knowledge that is big science, is encouraging and very courageous. I think coming from somebody like Prof. Firestein, who is a respected researcher and a product of the system, adds weight to the argument and he doesn't disappoint. The two chapters are very forceful, and it shows a lot of very deeply thought out argument against the strawman that is the Scientific Method.

Chapters 4 and 5 are his argument on why failure is something that is beyond what we think it is. We usually believe that failure is something that should be ameliorated and something that should lead us to a positive result. His argument is that failure is something much beyond that, much like what Nicholas Taleb’s take about Anti-fragility. Being anti-fragile means something beyond grittiness and resilient, it means more than just being able to survive the bad fortune, it means being able to benefit and thrive when circumstances are against you. In Prof. Firestein’s argument, failure leads to attaining a higher level of understanding of what we're trying to study and it leads us to discovering heretofore unknown dynamics within our knowledge base. It is the negative result which will leads us to better and broader understanding of nature. In Chapter 5 Prof. Firestein goes into a very impassioned argument for the integrity of failure. The integrity of failure means that we are honest with our results, we are committed to intellectual honesty in our work, we are willing to broadcast our failures to our fellow researchers because we are dedicated to the advancement of science over shielding our own fragile egos and reputations.

Chapter 6 and 7 are interesting because they go into how we're teaching the future of research and scientific investigations and how we are putting a wrong public face on what scientific research truly entails. The crux of it is that teaching future scientists the scientific method as the means to do research we are handcuffing them to a mythology of what scientific investigation is, which in turn stifles broad questioning of concepts and ideas. In addition, by telling the non-scientific world that the scientific method is the dominant mode of doing research, we are building up a fictional impression in the general public of what scientists do on a daily basis, thereby mythologizing doing science.

Chapters 9, 12, 13, and 14 has Prof. Firestein going deep into his own milieu of biological and pharmacological research. The chapters were interesting because I have no background in the area, so I waded in with great interest but with scant background to really dig into what he was trying to get at, I enjoyed it but I’m not sure I got everything that I could have out of it. This failure was all on my part of not understanding.

In Chapters 10, 11, and 14, Prof. Firestein really gets going philosophically. It was great reading; it was very interesting reading. He talks about overcoming are negative connotation of what data that does not meet with our hypothesis should mean to us and how we can get over that mental obstacle. In Chapter 11 Prof. Firestein talks about Karl Poppers, a philosopher who worked exclusively in the area of understanding what science is, or how to differentiate between real science and bad science.  It was a very educational chapter for me as I have always been interested in Popper's work, yet I have not read Poppers writing. Chapter 14 is where Prof. Firestein goes full force into the philosophical idea of a plurality. Most of us are devoted to a monistic belief, that there is only one single truth in this scientific world and that is just not true. In his dabbling in philosophy Prof. Firestein discovered this and he shares it with us and it was really a Tour de force chapter of writing where he takes you along with his experience in high level research and exploration; to think about what scientific reality is and about what our interpretation of reality is, what our mindset does to our scientific understanding of nature. A monistic scientific culture just doesn't ring true, given what we know now, demonstrating the principle that Prof. Firestein had argued all along: that our understand of the sciences are temporary, it lasts as long as the advent of the next discovery. The pluralistic one is so much more complete.

The book itself is a short one; although it is dense with ideas, ideas that we don't usually think about, ideas that we don't usually want to talk about, ideas that challenges our very existence as researchers and scientists. It is a fantastic read because it really does make you think about the meaning of scientific work, it challenges the closely held believe that you have regarding what you are doing. It is very healthy for people to read this; indeed, I believe it should be required reading for anyone who wants to get into the sciences, because it will change your viewpoint completely. I am reading this as an engineer,  I am not a scientist so my work is somewhat different because of what my company wants me to work on and what I need to do to get the desired results, which is not strictly the pursuit of pure and unadulterated truth, but it does gives me food for thought and it admonishes me to be honest and truthful when I am confronted with failure, and I can look at failure without fear or shame.

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