The Insight Exchange

I have in mind a way to foster cross-pollination and more interdisciplinary interaction among the sciences (both physical and social).  Initially, I had a hunch that such cross-pollination might be the key to my own discovery efforts as well as to that of others.  This is a little bit obvious in the case of researching scientific discovery itself as a topic, just by looking at the range of fields that publish literature on the process of discovery (psychology, sociology, philosophy, history, literary criticism, linguistics, etc.).  But it is maybe less obvious that this “meeting of the minds” across fields has a place for more technical scientific problems.

But a little reading suggests it might be useful.  J. Rogers Hollingsworth’s sociological study of institutional factors affecting discovery suggests that scientific diversity is important.  Though it is not at all clear to me what “diversity” means to Hollingsworth.  Across the physical sciences—so physicists, and biologists, and chemists, oh my?  Or among physicists–astrophysicists, condensed matter physicists, and medical physicists?  Or even narrower—just within particle physics: neutrino physicists, B meson physicists, and lepton flavor physicists?  I’ll have to dig more into Hollingsworth’s other work to find out.

Another intriguing study I found was a working paper by a group at Harvard, authored by Karim R. Lakhani et al. (I have not yet found out if the paper was ever published in a journal).  They did a study of an unusual situation: a for-profit company that posts open scientific problems, unresolved within the private sector, for a large (300,000+) group of scientists from backgrounds across all the sciences to help solve.  In other words, crowd science.  Scientists choose among the open problems they want to attempt and companies who obtain problem solutions award the solver with financial awards (in most cases).  What was intriguing about the study is that they found a positive correlation between the solver’s perceived distance to the problem field and their likelihood of solving it.  The more “outside” the solver, the more likely they were to solve it.  The devil is in the details though: what precisely do they mean by “’outsiders’ from relatively distant fields”?

But, again, it seems to me that there is room here to facilitate a “meeting of the minds” where there is the shared goal of “how do I discover something new?”.

On considering another article in Harvard Business Review by Greg Satell, describing breakthrough innovation with a quaint example about clams, pollutants, and microchips, I gather that, where there is a well-defined problem, opening it up to “unconventional skill domains”, i.e., other fields with other knowledge and techniques, can lead to simple, powerful solutions.

Hence the idea to start the “Insight Exchange”: facilitated sessions of small groups of truly cross-disciplinary scientists to discuss discovery, sticky problems, and strategies to make progress.  I look forward to hosting a first pilot test Exchange this coming Fall semester with a good-natured bunch of unsuspecting colleagues.  I’ll use much the same 90-minute format as the “Wisdom” session I facilitated as part of the joint University of Melbourne-Vanderbilt University Ethical Leadership Course one-week retreat that I participated in as a physics graduate student.

At the time, how I was finally assigned with such a deep topic as “wisdom” (as a physics graduate student?!) I don’t know.  But I suppose it set a precedent for being a bit fearless in the face of another such deep topic like scientific discovery.  And even more importantly, the assigned reading strongly biased me toward re-envisioning scientific discovery as a skill set that can be taught.  The first reading for the session was by Aristotle (Nichomachean Ethics, Book 6, chs. 5-8) where he stressed that a goal was prudence: the greatest good attainable through human action in a given situation.  The second reading was by a famous American psychologist, Robert J. Sternberg, who said that children should be taught wisdom as part of their school curriculum, as a well-defined skill made up of two teachable parts (having an awareness that things evolve over time and perceiving and acknowledging the legitimacy of opposing viewpoints).

Teach all children how to practice wisdom.  Do not wait and hope that wisdom will somehow find at least a few people, likely in old age.  This was a radical notion to me.  No doubt, my present beliefs about scientific discovery—teach all researchers how to practice scientific discovery, don’t wait and hope it strikes a few lone genius wunderkinds—have grown out of this vision.

With any luck the Insight Exchange will become a valuable real-world source for discovery tactics and diffusion of discovery strategies.  I mean what I say when I say that I believe that a multistream approach is necessary to science: as the water analogy implies, tributaries and streams allow you to cover vastly more ground than sticking to one large mainstream river of thought.  And if you create a venue to allow that multistream to converge in a shared reservoir, pooling resources, then you can truly harness the wisdom of the multistream.