Failure: Why Science Is So Successful

“Seek out those who search for the truth. Flee from those who claim to have found it.” André GideRecently I read Lisa Randall’s book, Dark Matter and Dinosaurs. It was replete with interesting information but perhaps what leapt out at me the most was her routine admission that she might simply be wrong. The process of discovery does not guarantee discovery. What it does assure is that there are many more questions to ask and angles from which to view the task at hand. Soon after reading her book I ran across a book review of Failure and knew I had to read it. Randall’s description of her efforts along with her colleagues is a great example of what Firestein describes in the book being reviewed.Firestein addressed his audience as if they were all scientists. For this review we’ll see the word “researcher” for much of the descriptions but the author’s point ought to be used for all problem solving. We can apply his philosophy to picking our candidate to vote for or buying a new car. There is a cost/benefit way of thinking by applying all of the things that have not worked, in order to think outside of the box and from a perspective that may. It simply is a requirement for critical thinking.The book is all about wonderment and the awe of not knowing. Many other scientists describe their own sense of not knowing, and this author cited several. Richard Feynman is perhaps the greatest representative of this concept. When a researcher is looking for answers they mostly fail to discover them. This is a career realm where failure is immense and that is a good thing. The author cites baseball batting averages as another and there are precious few other fields where the practitioner can get away with failure. Imagine how often a market manager can err. Okay, I meant one that is not intent on the indictment that often ensues.But the joy of not knowing and the skill of learning from failure are in the head of nearly all researchers so he is not telling them anything. He is providing information to the public, some of whom may be budding scientists themselves. This is good stuff to be thinking about for a lay person in order to understand how the scientific sausage is made. Too often science journalists are eager for the big story and misrepresent how discoveries are made. The less scrutinizing reader may fall prey to big story claims that soon fade away. That is where Firestein’s Failure might come in handy.So what makes failure a positive event? First and foremost according to the author is that failing forces the researcher to think more about what went wrong and provides new avenues of research and problem solving. It shows the dedication that the researcher has as well. Since failure occurs much more often than success, one can use that information as a database with which to continue experimenting.Firestein also goes after the notion of “The Scientific Method” by describing as that if it were a recipe. He seems to be attacking a straw dog in this regard. He asserts that he knows no scientist that follows what he describes as the “method”. Then he narrowly defines the ingredients of this approach. It has been my experience that the ingredients are larger than what he defined and that in fact scientists do use a system in order to attack the problem they are trying to solve. Firestein suggests that the hypothesis should not lead the experiment but rather come after the experiment.This seems to be more of a semantic trick of re-defining what a hypothesis is. It can be renamed from something to anything else but scientists don’t just wonder what will happen if two chemicals are mixed for instance. They still create a starting point for a test. They just do not randomly do something and then decide what it is by creating a hypothesis.One of the important points that he makes and he is not alone in this. He thinks that science is not at its best by being monistic. He feels that when being too specific in research, there is a lot of information and talent that is never tapped. This makes sense and also transcends science. Dualism means that several aspects of science ought to be utilized if only for the ideas and approaches that come from different fields. This dualism however is nothing new. Max Delbruck and George Gamow began a wonderful scientific dualism of biology and physics beginning when they first met in 1928. Currently there are an increasing number of scientific collaborations amongst disparate fields of study. Firestein’s point is still well taken. If a physicist is unable to learn from a chemist or anthropologist they are limiting the potential for their own research. I am always reminded of the racial restriction in major league baseball that lasted until the late 1940s. When a talent pool is restricted it weighs negatively on whatever the field of study is.Other things that Firestein attends to include the failure of the brief reign of Islamic science, scientific funding and scientific education to name a few. The latter he describes just as I and most of my peers experienced. To wit, we all are curious about nature in our early years. We wanted to know why some natural event occurred and we used our fertile while naïve ideas to conclude things. We learned that we were generally incorrect. Science education began failing us at around the 8th grade. It was replaced by something else.That was the rule of authority. Usually but not always, that being a deity as portrayed by some living “prophet”. We were directed to understand that everything is planned from outside of us and experiments. We were compelled to understand that failure was a negative thing and that we ought to have certain resolutions to everything. Correctness is rewarded and failure punished.This creates a culture of certainty rather than curiosity. This is the essential point of the book. Certainty dumbs us down. Failure makes us smarter. I think he is absolutely correct in this. That is what makes this book a good one despite its flaws.So let this review finish with a quote that showed up in some internet surfing. It is from a political radical, poet, and founder of the rock band the MC5. I only mention this for personal reasons. I lived in Ann Arbor when the author of the quote was newsworthy everyday including his absence from that city because he was imprisoned. The rundown mansion that he and his tribe inhabited ran a large banner that said “Free John”. So traipsing around town one morning with a friend, we determined to knock on the door of the house and request the use of their bathroom. This was met with confusion (they may have thought we were FBI) and so we explained that we saw the banner and needed relief. So upon explanation, they did laugh. This last paragraph of course has nothing to do with Firestein’s book but I wanted to include it anyway. Here is the quote which is much more appropriate to the book than this paragraph has been.“Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo”-John Sinclair

I have been a Stuart Firestein fan since I heard him interviewed on the BBC following the release of his previous book, Ignorance, which helped me structure my own less enjoyable book on national security as a wicked problem.As Firestein himself points out a few times, Failure is a less unified read than Ignorance.But don't let that deter you. This book is at least as important as his earlier one because Failure is at least as central to scientific life as ignorance and probably even less understood.His conclusions ring even more true in my own fields of peace studies and political science. As he points out, one almost never follows the canons of the so called scientific method. That's probably a good thing because there is a lot of stumbling around searching for answers and going down blind alleys whether you are a scholar or a practitioner or both as I am.For those of us in the applied social sciences, his lessons about failure are probably even more important than they are in the biological and other "hard" scientific world Firestein inhabits. Among peacebuilders, we often utter words like "fail early" and "fail well," but we don't really believe it because our funders have so far been unwilling to support projects that don't have a huge a priori likelihood of success. We may write about our failures (e.g. The Arab-Israeli peace process), but we rarely do so in a way that serves as a springboard for improving our work, though my own organization, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, is spearheading an effort to enhance the way we evaluate and learn from our work.This would have been a remarkable read even if it were as dull as the books most of us academics write.Luckily, it's not. Firestein's self-deprecating sense of humor permeates each chapter.In short, a wonderful book that is already on the "to read" piles of my academic and activist colleagues.

Failure: Why Science Is So Successful, covers the importance of failure in science. The best example is Edison, who, when he explained that he tried 100 different materials for his electric bulb, all which failed, was not failure, but he now knew 100 materials that did not work, so learned much from his experiment (p30). Firestone, a professor of biology at Columbia University, applies this observation to evolution. Evolution, he notes, results from millions of random mutations, which he calls the nuts and bolts of how all life got here (p. 21). The process of evolution is “essentially copying mistakes, a failure most of the time.” He adds that these mutations are “overwhelmingly failures” meaning that the vast majority are negative, either near neutral or harmful. Realizing that Darwin’s insight of natural selection of variety in nature (although he called the hereditary particles gemmules and got the process of inheritance wrong) explains all life, Firestein calls Darwin’s insight one of the greatest insights in biology which accounts for his vaulted position in the pantheon of biologists and scientists in general (p.53). The problem is we are now becoming swamped with mutational caused diseases, a fact Firestein ignores. Nonetheless the book is very readable, almost homey, and shows failure from a very different light.

People misunderstand the purpose, or perhaps the logic or system, of science. In this book we can see a *brilliant* perspective towards what science really is. I could realize how wrong I have been about how it works, and I feel glad that I actually got to read this book. I am thinking of becoming a scientist/engineer and this book has opened my mind to what I am really going to experience.I recommend this book because it tells clearly how science works, and gives meaning to it altogether.What an excellent book. I wish it'd be longer.

I got this book for my daughter in university - along with "Ignorance How It Drives Science" - she tells me that she is thankful she now has them both. Her Biology Prof had recommended the "Ignorance How It Drives Science" and we got this one along with it. She says they are both very helpful.

Nós fazer dar importância às falhas para melhores escolhas, rever e/ou redirecionar nossas ações. Isso pode ser aplicado, inclusive, na vida pessoal!

Great as documentation of a fascinating aspect of how science progresses. A bit academic in trying to over-define failure.

Provocative and insightful.

Experienced scientists often seem to gravitate towards the history and philosophy of science as they get older, and this book certainly follows that trend. The provocative use of the word "failure" is something of a marketing gimmick to sell books and lecture tours, but there is a kernel of truth in there that is used an anchor for the parts of the book.The basic idea is that the majority of science is defined by failure, e.g. hypotheses that don't work out and experiments that don't go where they are supposed to. He then goes on to talk about the history of science, and how for example many scientific successes that we now rely on every day were accidental or tangential, and so the whole process of developing a hypothesis and testing it (i.e. the Scientific Method we hear about) is probably not what scientists really do. He also develops on to a critique of the way that science is funded, for example grant proposals that explain in detail how experiments will be conducted and what result will be reached, even though perhaps nature is not ready to reveal those results just yet.It's an interesting point of view, and worth mulling over, although it seems to me that some of this is a bit of a rant and just trying to make a point in a contentious way.