Nature Chemistry | The Sceptical Chymist

Look my way

I’ve been chatting with some friends these last couple of days, and we’ve developed a new* theory that could generally be applied to chemistry/chemists, so I thought I’d share. The idea is that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who know things and those who look things up. The first category also includes the subgroup ‘people who don’t know anything but pretend that they do’ (which is a topic for another day).

It’s obvious that, in the modern age, it’s becoming increasingly easier to look things up. It used to be that you had to go to college or a library (or perhaps to someone’s house who had a set of encyclopedias) to learn about the Diels-Alder reaction or the physical properties of mercury. But now you just use a book you have handy, or the internet, or even your phone to find out almost anything instantly. I assume this is why I’ve never been asked to memorize the periodic table (aaaaah! Chemistry sacrilege!!). Anyway, this inspires a few questions:

1. Given the extent of information that is now available, is it even possible to be a person who knows things anymore, or are we all just people who look things up, with some people looking up less things than others?

2. Does it matter if we don’t know things, and just look things up? What information is worth knowing?

3. Do we specifically know less because it’s easier to look things up? Meaning, do our minds subconsciously say “what’s the point in really learning the preferred ionization state of Iridium if you can get the information in 3 seconds and instead use those neurons to remember what time your favorite TV show is on?” And if that’s the case, can we reverse that? Do we want to?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. It is obvious that it’s hard to know where to look some things up if you never learned them in the first place, or at least how to use that information once you have it if you never had a place for it in your overall world view. … Anyway, I’m curious to know what you guys think.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

  • OK, you probably have all already thought of this. But, that should mean that your comments are even more thoughtful and inspired??

Comments

  1. Report this comment

    excimer said:

    Science isn’t about learning stuff, it’s about finding out new things that people didn’t know before. It’s nice to be able to look things up quickly, but in the end, the creative process, the gateway to new ideas, is in your head, and it’s in your head that you have to apply what you know to new ideas. So I’d argue that a good scientist would require both easy access to knowledge but also a fair command of the material. But the extent to which a good scientist requires either depends on the person. A person can have command of the literature and not be able to come up with a single new idea if his life depended on it (we call them “premeds”), or can know two random things and be able to come up with something new and crazy and revolutionary (we call them “engineers”). Scientists are probably somewhere in between- you have to know what’s been done in order to figure out what hasn’t been (or more importantly, shouldn’t be).

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    AS said:

    With interdisciplinary science becoming increasingly common (and in my mind, increasingly essential), we as scientists have two options available to us: we can either pursue such interdisciplinary work as part of a team of experts, each highly specialized in their own particular area of the project, or we can each try to master as many of the facts and techniques required for the work, regardless of whether these come from physiology, crystallography, inorganic chemistry, or enzymology (I only list some of the fields that biological chemists must navigate on a daily basis).

    There are definitely things to be said in favor of both options, but from my own personal experience, I can say that most interdisciplinary researchers fuse both approaches. So even if I can walk down the hallway and consult with my friendly neighbourhood crystallographer, I will probably first use SciFinder and Google and whatever else it takes (even a textbook!) to first make sure that my question isn’t a waste of his time. Or when I see an interesting but abstruse talk from a chemical engineer, I can research terms from the talk and perhaps discover a whole branch of fluid mechanics that illuminates my own work. Now whether I am losing something essential to the scientific process by doing so, is a question I’ll leave to someone else to address…

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    Andrew Sun said:

    I think you missed an important third – those who structuralize things.

    Information without any structure won’t inspire you to find anything further.

    Information that’s set into your own structure lead you to a unique question that anyone else may not come to.

  4. Report this comment

    Retread said:

    " A person can have command of the literature and not be able to come up with a single new idea if his life depended on it (we call them “premeds”) " — hmm. This statement would certainly come as a surprise to a medical school classmate whose work led to the statins and a Nobel. It would also surprise a similarly benighted individual in the class behind who received a Nobel for the prion concept, a concept of some interest to chemists (and, amazingly enough, not originated by them).

  5. Report this comment

    Catherine said:

    Interesting comments, folks!

    People who structuralize things… It’s definitely true that there are some people who make completely surprising connections between different fields or ideas. Usually this is credited to serendipity (a fortuitous experimental error, chasing down an apparent artifact, or a seemingly random collision of information that triggers a realization of some kind), but perhaps these chance occurrances are set in motion or more readily recognized because of an unusual personal information structure to begin with?

    I wonder about the groupings, though – are these folks a subset of ‘people who know things’, or do they form an overlapping circle with the other two? I need some Venn diagrams…

  6. Report this comment

    Richard said:

    Re your question about the information worth knowing, what about that famous quote:

    “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

    [Oliver Wendell Holmes?]

  7. Report this comment

    Invader Xan said:

    Personally, I believe I know much much more because I can look things up so quickly. It pays to have a good memory, because if you either remember fine details or know how to keep a good notebook, you’ll only have to look things up once.

    How easy it is to look things up depends on how esoteric your field is too. Most organic synthesis reactions are available (complete with references) on Wikipedia, but I study astrochemistry. Sometimes I have to look very hard to find what I need. If it wasn’t so easy to find published data on the internet, there are some important pieces of information which I might not have found at all!

  8. Report this comment

    C. Bailey said:

    I’m still in school, and I understand the utility of a bit of memorization here and there. I’m glad I was asked to memorize the amino acids for biochemistry and have a grasp of fundamental organic reactions in organic chemistry and had memorize enough pKas to guestimate what most pKas of organic compounds are. But I really think that ultimately, beyond having a baseline set of basic knowledge, being a walking encyclopedia is useless. In laboratory research projects and in evaluating the literature, having the skills to look up information quickly and efficiently has always been more useful to me than just knowing things off the top of my head. There’s a lot of information available, and a lot of information to navigate. As was mentioned before—as biological chemistry becomes more and more interdisciplinary, we need to have a basic conceptual grasp of other fields outside of our own. One thing that always impresses my parents is how quickly I can dig information up on the internet through a quick web search, and I think that is the strength of my generation that grew up with the internet. People complain that we can’t spell, do basic math, and have bad handwriting, but we are very good at navigating databases and sifting through vast amounts of information.

    There’s a difference between knowing information of the top of your head and knowing that information exists and how to find it. I think that the latter is more important in the internet age that storing the actual details in your head. You can always go “oh wasn’t there a paper on…” or without remembering the every detail of the experimental design and draw a connection—as long as you know that it’s out there.

  9. Report this comment

    C. Bailey said:

    Another thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how the internet has revolutionized information spread generally—and these debates are not unique to science. My friend who is a classicist described a similar phenomenon when the Perseus Project (https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) went up when he was in high school, which changed the way that students tended to study texts because the words were hyperlinked. This meant that knowing strict grammatical structures and vocabulary off the top of his head became less and less important for learning how to interpret and translate texts.

    Sometimes I think all this debate over whether or not knowing information that you can look up is important is just a lot of silly generational carry-over due to the fact that most senior professionals and academics remember a time before the internet existed. Having grown up with the internet for most of elementary school on (I’m 20)—essentially all of my intellectual life—the idea that all information is at my fingertips is a pretty natural one. After all, the printing press made memorization of epic poems like the Iliad obsolete and basically broke down the art of the oral tradition. However, it led to a new rise in literature and information spread that was all together fantastic. I really don’t think that so-called “knowing less” is a bad thing if we know different things, i.e. emphasize skills over knowledge.

    I have a feeling that education will become more and more geared to teaching students how to find information, how to process information, and how to be aware that information exists rather than just how to learn information given to them, and thus will lead to more scientists who can think creatively and bring ideas together in novel ways. I also think that being aware of information but not necessarily knowing it is going to be more important. For example I skim RSS feeds of science journals fairly regularly often very casually with my coffee at breakfast in between reading the New York Times (also online). But due to the sheer volume of journal articles, I obviously can’t digest everything. It’s right at my finger tips—and if I can recall a title or abstract that relates to something I want to know more about on a later occasion, I can usually find it with a google search in a matter of minutes. Then, if I need to know it in greater detail, I can sit down and really hammer through the article to understand what they did and how it might apply to some other concept. If I don’t understand some detail of the paper I can usually look it up in Wikipedia.

    This gives me an opportunity to allow myself to have a broad scientific literacy—even if I don’t understand all the details—that would not be available before the internet.

  10. Report this comment

    Catherine said:

    Thanks for the comments, C.

    There is often talk about which technologies are becoming obsolete, but you raise the very interesting point about which ways of thinking might just be on their way out entirely. I will have to ponder that some more.

    I think the danger of not knowing things (and always looking them up) is that if everyone stops knowing things, we will be reliant on what other people have made available (not always correct) and what we are able to make of that information (which may require a conceptual context). Eventually (in the worst case scenario), no one will know anything. So, I guess I don’t agree that it’s entirely a historical artifact.

    For example, (I like examples) we’ve just published a paper about engineering biosynthetic enzymes in plants. If it were in bacteria, it would be no big news at all (or, at least, much less interesting). But plants are really hard to manipulate. So if you didn’t have that context, you might think it’s a boring paper.

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    Radoslav Bozov said:

    Dear Catherine,

    Allow me to infer to few of your comments:

    1. Looking up things will make you brain lazy unless you predict what you are going to look up.

    2. The periodic table was not designed to be memorized but rather being able to predict properties of elements and/or molecules. However, this doesn’t mean that we completely understand them.

    3. Synthetic chemistry requires sense of how electrons delocalize.

    4. Plants tend to repress their genome as evolutionary mechanism to fight agains expressing repeated regions. This is where methylation comes in play with ncRNA.

    5. Most of great discoveries were not understood initially because they could have not been looked up.

    6. few quotes form a great physicist ""The only real valuable thing is intuition."

    and ""We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

    7. On your qustion: What information is worth knowing answer is Information has no meaning wihtout bending teh theory behind it. It is not about facts.

    8. You can publish 200 papers because you crushed yourslef memorizing information, and 200 years form now the world will be teh same!

    9. Is someone you think pretends knowing what he is talking about, falsifying him by asking a question. Much of great work has been ignorred for some time, starting from Mendel to Einsten.

    10. If you didn’t understand some idea or concept, try studying it first before you ignore it.

    11. a quote “Biology don’t make sense outside of physics”

    12. Structurizing information don’t hold water, because function precedes structure.

    13. TV decreases virtual creativity and increases stupidity!