Unsubscribe at any time. We're not really sure what it means to have consciousness ourselves. He says that when children are young they are fascinated by science, but as they grow older this curiosity almost vanishes. Don't prepare a lecture. You can't help it. It was either him or George Gamow. For more of Stuart Firesteins thoughts on ignorance check out the description for his Columbia course on Ignoranceand his book, Ignorance: How It Drives Science. FIRESTEINAnd in my opinion, a huge mistake by the way. What do I need to learn next?). That course, in its current incarnation, began in the spring of 2006. I think the idea of a fishing expedition or what's often called curiosity-driven research -- and somehow or another those things are pejorative, it's like they're not good. Persistence is a discipline that you learn; devotion is a dedication you can't ignore.', 'In other words, scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also miniscule, but rather on what they don't know. Like the rest of your body it's a kind of chemical plant. The book then expand this basic idea of ignorance into six chapters that elaborate on why questions are more interesting and more important in science than facts, why facts are fundamentally unreliable (based on our cognitive limits), why predictions are useless, and how to assess the quality of questions. Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance, (18:33), TED talks Ignorance: The Birthsplace of Bang: Stuart Firestein at TEDxBrussels, (16:29) In his 2012 book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, Firestein argues that pursuing research based on what we don't know is more valuable than building on what we do know. And I wonder if the wrong questions are being asked. The scientific method was a huge mistake, according to Firestein. That much of science is akin to bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be while searching for something that might, or might not be in the room. 1. 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Firestein, the chair of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, thinks that this is a good metaphor for science. Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance TED 22.5M subscribers Subscribe 1.3M views 9 years ago What does real scientific work look like? His new book is titled "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." Thank you for being here. Firestein believes that educators and scientists jobs are to push students past these boundaries and look outside of the facts. Every answer given on principle of experience begets a fresh question.-Immanuel Kant. And how does our brain combine that blend into a unified perception? But in point, I can't tell you how many times, you know, students have come to me with some data and we can't figure out what's going on with it. Now how did that happen? And now it's become a technical term. And I'm thinking, really? So I'm being a little provocative there. I think science and medicine has set it up for the public to expect us to expound facts, to know things. FIRESTEINThat's right. As the Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles describes it: Its groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, Oh, wow, so thats how it looks, and then its off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline. Most of us have a false impression of science as a surefire, deliberate, step-by-step method for finding things out and getting things done. It's time to open the phones. I'm at the moment attending here in Washington a conference at the National Academy of Scientists on communicating science to the public. FIRESTEINThank you so much for having me. All rights reserved. I mean, this is of course a problem because we would like to make science policy and we'd like to make political policy, like climate or where we should spend money in healthcare and things like that. CHRISTOPHERFoundational knowledge is relatively low risk, but exploratory research has relatively high risks for potential gain. We have spent so much time trying to understand, not only what it is but we have seemed to stumble on curing it. And these solid facts form the edifice of science, an unbroken record of advances and insights embodied in our modern views and unprecedented standard of living. Stuart Firestein teaches students and citizen scientists that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge. FIRESTEINWell, of course, you know, part of the problem might be that cancer is, as they say, the reward for getting older because it wasn't really a very prevalent disease until people began regularly living past the age of 70 or so. You can buy these phrenology busts in stores that show you where love is and where compassion is and where violence is and all that. And that's an important part of ignorance, of course. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It's the smartest thing I've ever heard said about the brain, but it really belongs to a comic named Emo Phillips. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. "Please explain the difference between your critique of facts and the post-modern critique of science.". The positive philosophy that Firestein provides is relevant to all life's endeavors whether politics, religion, the arts, business, or science, to be broad-minded, build on errors (don't hide them), & consider newly discovered "truths" to be provisional. And this is all science. And you have to get past this intuitive sense you have of how your brain works to understand the real ways that it works. Were hoping to rely on our loyal readers rather than erratic ads. 9. CHRISTOPHERGood morning. or treatment. Listen for an exploration into the secrets of cities, find out how the elusive giant squid was caught on film and hear a case for the virtue of ignorance. Well, this now is another support of my feeling the facts are sort of malleable. Part of what we also have to train people to do is to learn to love the questions themselves. His new book is titled, "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." What I'd like to comment on was comparing foundational knowledge, where you plant a single tree and it grows into a bunch of different branches of knowledge. They need to be able to be revised and we have to accept that's the world we live in and that's what science does. You had to create a theory and then you had to step back and find steps to justify that theory. Short break, we'll be right back. Science is always wrong. Thursday, Feb 09 2023The post-Roe battle continues as a judge in Texas considers a nationwide ban on abortion pills. It does not store any personal data. 4. The very driving force of science, the exhilaration of the unknown is missing from our classrooms. Id like to tell you thats not the case., Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don't know -- or "high-quality ignorance" -- just as much as what we know. And many people tried to measure the ether and this and that and finally the failure to measure the ether is what allowed Einstein to come up with relativity, but that's a long story. African American Studies And The Politics Of Ron DeSantis, Whats Next In The Fight Over Abortion Access In The US. I use that term purposely to be a little provocative. And, you know, we all like our ideas so we get invested in them in little ways and then we get invested in them in big ways and pretty soon I think you wind up with a bias in the way you look at the data. FIRESTEINA great discussion with your listeners. If all you want in life are answers, then science is not for you. We're learning about the fundamental makeup of the universe. Ignorance, it turns out, is really quite profound.Library Journal, 04/15/12, Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, biologist Stuart Firestein says in todays TED talk. FIRESTEINIn Newton's world, time is the inertial frame, if you will, the constant. translators. Stuart Firestein teaches students and citizen scientists that ignorance is far more important to discovery than knowledge. At the same time I spent a lot of time writing and organizing lectures about the brain for an undergraduate course that I was teaching. It will completely squander the time. I'm big into lateralization of brain and split-brain surgery, separation of the corpus callosum. Thats why we have people working on the frontier. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Bullseye. You have to have Brian on the show for that one. Firestein says there is a common misconception among students, and everyone else who looks at science, that scientists know everything. Somebody else could work on a completely different question about smell. Its black cats in dark rooms. And so it occurred to me that perhaps I should mention some of what we dont know, what we still need to find out, what are still mysteries, what still needs to be done so that these students can get out there and find out, solve the mysteries and do these undone things. Assignment Timeline Entry 1 Week 1 Forum Quiz 1 Week 2: Methodology of Science Learning Objectives Describe the process of the scientific method in research and scientific investigation. I'm a working scientist. And you want -- I mean, in this odd way, what you really want in science is to be disproven. If Firestein is correct that science needs to be about asking good, ( and I think he is) and that the current schooling system inhibits this (and I think it does)then do we have a learning framework for him. As mentioned by Dr. Stuart Firestein in his TED Talk, The pursuit of ignorance, " So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. Firestein is married to Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist at Hunter College and the City University of New York, where she studies animal behavior. A biologist and expert in olfaction at Columbia. He compares science to searching for a black cat in a dark room, even though the cat may or may not be in there. "[8] The book was largely based on his class on ignorance, where each week he invited a professor from the hard sciences to lecture for two hours on what they do not know. About the speaker Stuart Firestein Neuroscientist FIRESTEINBut the quote is -- and it's an old adage, it's anonymous and says, it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room especially when there's no cat, which seems to me to be the perfect description of how we do science. They imagine a brotherhood tied together by its golden rule, the Scientific Method, an immutable set of precepts for devising experiments that churn out the cold, hard facts. These are the things of popular science programs like Nature or Discovery, and, while entertaining, they are not really about science, not the day-to-day, nitty-gritty, at the office and bench kind of science. A science course. THE PURSUIT OF IGNORANCE. And those are the things that ought to be interesting to us, not the facts. MR. STUART FIRESTEINAnd one of the great puzzles -- one of the people came to my ignorance class was a professor named Larry Abbott who brought up a very simple question. REHMThanks for calling, Christopher. My first interests were in science. Addeddate 2013-09-24 16:11:11 Duration 1113 Event TED2013 Filmed 2013-02-27 16:00:00 Identifier StuartFirestein_2013 Original_download What conclusions do you reach or what questions do you ask? [6], After earning his Ph.D. in neurobiology, Firestein was a researcher at Yale Medical School, then joined Columbia University in 1993.[7]. Now he's written a book titled "Ignorance: How it Drives Science." REHMStuart Firestein, he's chair of the department of biology at Columbia University, short break here and we'll be right back. And I really think that Einstein's general theory of relativity, you know, engulfed, after 200 years or so, Newton's well-established laws of physics. In his new book, Ignorance, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein goes where most academics dare not venture. It's commonly believed the quest for knowledge is behind scientific research, but neuroscientist Stuart Firestein says we get more from ignorance. The difference is they ought to begin with the questions that come from those conclusions, not from the conclusion. So proof and proofs are, I think, in many sciences -- now, maybe mathematics is a bit of an exception, but even there I think I can think of an example, not being a mathematician even, where a proof is fallen down because of some new technology or some new technique in math. The ignorant are unaware, unenlightened, uninformed, and surprisingly often occupy elected offices. And then one day I thought to myself, wait a minute, who's telling me that? And I say to them, as do many of my colleagues, well, look, let's get the data and then we'll come up with a hypothesis later on. FIRESTEINYou might try an FMRI kind of study. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. And it just reminded me of something I read from the late, great Steven J. Gould in one of his essays about science where he talks, you know, he thinks scientific facts are like immutable truths, you know, like religion, the word of God, once they find it. FIRESTEINWell, I think this is a question that now plagues us politically and economically as well as we have to make difficult decisions about limited resources. Some issues are, I suppose, totally beyond words or very hard to find words for, although I think the value of metaphors is often underrated. REHMBut, you know, take medical science, take a specific example, it came out just yesterday and that is that a very influential group is saying it no longer makes sense to test for prostate cancer year after year after year REHMbecause even if you do find a problem with the prostate, it's not going to be what kills you FIRESTEINThat's right at a certain age, yes. One kind of ignorance is willful stupidity; worse than simple stupidity, it is a callow indifference to facts or logic. And one of them came up with the big bang and the other one ridiculed them, ridiculed the theory of saying, well this is just some big bang theory, making it sound as silly as possible. "Knowledge is a big subject, says Stuart Firestein, but ignorance is a bigger one. And I'm just trying to push the needle a little bit to the other side because when you work in science you realize it's the questions that you really care the most about. That's Positron Emission Tomography. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. And we do know things, but we don't know them perfectly and we don't know them forever. IGNORANCE How It Drives Science. They work together well in that one addresses, for the most part, the curiosity that comes from acknowledging one's ignorance and seeking to find answers while the other addresses the need to keep that curiosity alive through the many failures one will sustain while seeking . It means a lot because of course there is this issue of the accessibility of science to the public FIRESTEINwhen we're talking some wacko language that nobody can understand anymore. If I understand the post-modern critique of science, which is that it's just another set of opinions, rather than some claim on truth, some strong claim on truth, which I don't entirely disagree with.
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