, 4 min read
To be smarter, try being crazier?
Many of us want to be original in our work. For researchers, it is a job requirement. For software programmers, it makes little sense to redo what others did.
Many of the people who did great things stood out by their originality. Great scientists like Nash are sometimes slightly or entirely mad. Many of the brightest minds belong to minorities that entertain uncommon values and practices (e.g., Jews). Turing effectively admitted he was gay at a time when this could get you badly mistreated.
It is not that being weird or mad makes you brilliant, of course. But I think that there is a hidden causality between originality and brilliance.
- By trying original new things, you learn more or, at least, you gain more valuable insights. Everything else being equal, a software programmer that learns exotic programming languages, or tries out exotic platforms, will hold more valuable expertise.
- Being more original might allow you to see things that others just do not see. In his autobiography, James Bach recounts how he could not help but to see a disconnect between the (academic) theory of software testing, and what actually worked in practice. He co-wrote one of the most important book in his field. Though software testing is usually more of a low-status activity (e.g., compared with software development), he managed to leap ahead and become somewhat famous precisely because he embraced his originality instead of hiding it.
Given these benefits, you would think that everyone would go wild and keep on experimenting with crazy ideas and practices. But that is not at all what happens.
In fact, most of us try to “fit in” as the benefits of fitting in are often perceived to out-weight the theoretical benefits that come with originality.
There is no denying that originality gets you in trouble. For example, I am an experienced gardener, but my garden often looks like hell because it is of giant experiment with many failures. Though my father would have me install a sprinkler system, I have purposefully rejected the idea, to try a build a garden that works without artificial watering… just to see how far I can push the idea. As a result of my experiments, I might know a few weird things that most gardeners do not know. However, I do not have much recognition as a good gardener and my experiments have been costly at times.
I have been around many college professors and they all tend to look the same. Moderately clean shirts with short hair. (In my case, very short hair.) Ladies professors are just as bland looking as their male colleagues.
The inability of professors to try different looks is also reflected in their work. I started out by saying that originality is a job requirement for researchers. When we review grant proposals, we do get annoyed when people propose to do work that has been done repeatedly in the past, or that looks like what everyone else is doing. But while lack of originality might trigger boredom, true originality is likely to trigger instant rejection.
A colleague of mine recently made a major discovery. He toyed with the idea of basing his upcoming research program around this discovery, but after checking with wise colleagues, he is proposing a continuation of what he did for the last 20 years. If he were to propose a radical shift of his research agenda toward something that nobody is doing, he would likely get sunk. He can, of course, pursue his radical ideas on the side, and once they mature, he will be able to come in the open. Let us contrast this with Google’s secret lab, Google X. Hand-picked engineers pursue truly original ideas. Such pursuits, at least as far as I know, are absurdly rare.
I think I would be richer and have a higher status if I had played it safer throughout my life. Conformance definitively wins out most of the time. Until it does not. We always hear about exciting research coming out of the most prestigious laboratories. However, on the whole, researchers are a boring lot. (I spent part of the last few weeks reviewing grant proposals.) They stick with what they know, they propose ideas that are mostly risk-free. Though I have read dozens of grant proposals in the last few years, I have not seen a successful grant leave anything to chance. Let us consider open source software projects. It is generally plagued with endless repetition. How many web frameworks do we have? It is always amazing to me to see that so many programmers use their free time to build risk-free software, effectively cloning what thousands have done before.
The problem is that failure is how you learn. The bigger your failures, the most important are your learning opportunities. Though I think you can succeed socially, I don’t think you can remain truly smart while avoiding failures. And you cannot be super smart by avoiding massive failures.
At the very least, screwing up makes for interesting stories.
Further reading: McAdle’s new book: The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success.