Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire: Knowledge
On why knowledge is the easiest ingredient to add to a scientist’s repertoire.
This is the third post in a four-part series. In an older post I defined “knowledge” as “recognizing what you don’t know.” You can view that post here.
How can a black woman write from the perspective of a white man who would have lived 250 years before she was born?
When I was writing my Master’s in English (with a concentration in creative writing) that question put me in a quandary.
I had switched from physics to psychology and then ended up in creative writing (before ending up back in physics). When I had to decide the kind of fiction writing I wanted to specialize in I went for what I thought would be the obvious choice: something I love to read and something my science background would make me good at.
You’re probably guessing I went for science fiction. You’d be wrong.
I chose historical fiction.
I figured historical fiction also required excellent research skills. So, as a middle-class, 30-something African American woman living in the 20th century, I had to figure out how to write from the perspective of my chosen main character, who was a 20-something Caucasian man from a wealthy background living in the 18th century.
To do that I needed information (aka knowledge) about that time and place. Lots of information.
In general, trying to pick up a perspective to use is always like this. It often requires knowledge. Last week I talked about how mindset is such a crucial part of the scientist’s repertoire. Knowledge is a key part of putting that mindset (or perspective) to good use.
But today I’m going to argue that knowledge is actually the easiest ingredient to add to your scientist’s repertoire.
From a first principles perspective:
Internet access lets you easily add other people’s knowledge to your science repertoire.
I know many of my neutrino phenomenology colleagues would argue with my claim right away. Knowledge can be incredibly hard, and expensive, to come by in the current era of big data, big networks, and big experiments.
For example, many neutrino phenomenology studies (scientific investigations of what experiments can tell us about the properties of fundamental particles called neutrinos) can take literally years before the highly sensitive detectors can detect even a handful (maybe five to twenty) of the desired particle interactions we are trying to observe.
Another good example of hard to come by knowledge is longitudinal studies in health:
It’s hard to get a large group of participants. When you get them, it’s hard to keep them: they flake out, they stop adhering to the study requirements, or worst case scenario they die before the study ends. And it’s hard to track all those participants over long enough time scales, like decades, to be able to draw correlations about how certain life choices or environmental exposures affect health outcomes.
I don’t disagree that some knowledge is not easy to get.
But relative to mindset, which can be invisible and is strongly ingrained, or relative to skills or activities, which take tremendous training and practice to implement, knowledge is relatively easy to pick up and change.
That’s because my thinking is focused on an individual’s knowledge, not the sum total of all knowledge. (On InSci I focus on how the individual can improve their scientific discovery practices.)
For an individual, read a line of text here or there and… Boom!
Now you know that male otters use communal toilet spaces. The knowledge base in your scientist’s repertoire just increased.
Partly this has to do with the vast knowledge reserve we have today, namely the internet. It’s easier than ever to call up resources like public databases, personal recollections, peer-review pieces, and conversations or talks on just about any subject. All of this is fodder for scientific investigation, if handled properly.
Additionally, knowledge is easier to add to your repertoire because when you tell someone, like a funder or investor, that you need to get more knowledge they usually agree with you (assuming the topic is important to them).
If you tell them you want funding to change your mindset, or to get trained in certain skills, or to have a chance to participate in certain activities, it can be a harder sell. Just look at the amount of money put into knowledge-making machines, like the LHC at CERN, versus the amount put into skill-building modules, like learning to conduct literature reviews, at your average university. It’s a fortune versus a pittance.
(As a sad side note: I was required to take an entire one semester course just on how to conduct a decent literature review for my Master’s in English. But it was never discussed in my coursework for my degrees in Psychology or Physics. No wonder my Physics Ph.D. advisor always marveled that I was able to find obscure or hard to find items. After going through four months of rigorous teacher feedback on how to find every known copy of an American slave account published between 1600 and 1800, anywhere in the world, finding an English translation of an old Russian neutrino paper seemed manageable.)
Some might say that knowledge may be acquired relatively easy, but disseminating it is still hard, especially in today’s world of proprietary mechanisms like patents and trade secrets. And then there are people who are just miserly with giving out information.
Perhaps. But if the knowledge exists, and it’s in written or other recorded form, then history suggests that the knowledge always eventually enters the public domain.
Sometimes that may be in 5 years, other times in 100 years.
But either way, the knowledge belonging to the one becomes the knowledge belonging to the many, in the long term.
Compare that to skills or activities. It’s hard to find someone who can teach you the earliest ways of the cave painters, because that craftsmanship has died out. But our knowledge that cave paintings exist and of some of their properties lives on.
Arguably, the fact that knowledge eventually “goes public” doesn’t guarantee that you personally can add it to your repertoire, but this depends on what knowledge and what time frame you’re interested in.
Right now you have access to knowledge that would have been closely guarded two hundred years ago within a wealthy elite. But today you are barred from knowledge that is closely guarded within the corporate and government spheres.
By analogy:
Knowledge is to science what ingredients are to cooking.
Still, overall, especially when it comes to science, everyone shares the same agenda. The acquisition of knowledge is paramount. Science is the business of learning new knowledge about our universe.
It’s sort of like cooking:
Everyone agrees that ingredients (~ knowledge) like herbs, spices, vegetables, etc., are crucial to succeeding at cooking (~ science). You may not have access to the same cooking ingredients as somebody else. But everyone sees the necessity of having at least some ingredients if you want to cook. And most everybody, everywhere, has access to some cooking ingredients, at least some of the time.
From a holistic perspective:
Most groups agree that knowledge is powerful so they value its pursuit.
In this way we share a common understanding that knowledge is a crucial science ingredient and, hence, many people are working to expand the collective knowledge domain. That’s why the internet is so full of facts (bits of knowledge). And that web trove of data grants you a way to add it to your own repertoire stash.
It’s easy to find experts in many domains, to find resources of every type and description, and to find attempts to capture, share, interpret, or analyze knowledge. It’s a common theme that knowledge is a powerful tool. You don’t have to do much convincing for people to be in synergy on this point.
And why do groups value science and knowledge so much?
Because you can put it to various uses. Every group has its own use case in mind. And having the knowledge makes implementing those use cases possible.
From an applied perspective:
Cultivate credible and thoughtful sources to add knowledge to your science repertoire.
This brings me to my last point. Because we are in such an information-rich environment in the current era, from a practical standpoint, knowledge is very easy to add to your repertoire.
You just need to develop a mental, or written, collection of credible and valuable sources and refer to them often.
This can be people with field expertise or databases with written, visual, or auditory records.
It might be experiments or conferences where you can be exposed to fresh knowledge.
It might be a timeless book or essay, or a person who is a tremendous conversationalist.
You just need to be mindful that your knowledge base continues to grow over time. It can’t stagnate.
As a discoverer your job is to find new causal links and new meaning. Often times old causes and a lack of meaning are due to insufficient evidence to suggest the right explanation. So getting more evidence in the form of new knowledge is key.
Also, knowing about available activities and mindsets is a form of knowledge. Again, it’s important to have broad experience with new ones from credible and valuable sources.
So while some might argue that gaining new knowledge is the most time-consuming, costly, and resource-intensive part of expanding a scientist’s repertoire, despite all these hardships, I still think it’s the easiest to accumulate, relative to the other three themes.
There are many cooks in the science kitchen, willing to throw in a dash of this and a dash of that to see what new explanation they can cook up.
With so much enthusiasm to contribute to science going around, it’s easy to find people capable of bringing new ingredients to the table.
After all, scientific discovery is partly about spicing things up and bringing a new flavor of thought to a much chewed over idea.
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- The Open Library (unpaywall), https://openlibrary.org/ .
- The Net Advance of Physics, http://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/ .
- com. “Micr-O Fiction: 8 Provocative Writers Tell Us a Story in 300 Words or Less.” O, The Oprah Magazine, July 2006 issue, http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/micro-fiction-short-stories-from-famous-writers.
- Gorman, James. “A River Otter’s Hot Spot? The Latrine.” The New York Times, September 19, 2016, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/science/river-otters-socialize-at-the-latrine.html.
Related Content on The Insightful Scientist:
Blog Posts
- Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 1 of 4: Activities – On why activities should be the largest part of a scientist’s repertoire
- Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 2 of 4: Mindset – On why mindset is the most effortful part of a scientist’s repertoire
- Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 4 of 4: Skills (coming soon)
- Spring and Well: How to divide an individual’s discovery ability into four major themes
How To Posts
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Research Spotlight Posts
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How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Elements of the Scientist’s Repertoire, Part 3 of 4: Knowledge – On why knowledge is the easiest ingredient to add to a scientist’s repertoire”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, December 20, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/elements-of-the-scientists-repertoire-part-3-of-4-knowledge.
[Page feature photo: Dried beans and spices for sale at a market in Vietnam. Photo by v2osk on Unsplash.]