Innovation demands risk-taking, sometimes contrary to our best academic instincts of enhancing our image within our community of scholars. By forecasting what we expect to find and using new data to justify prejudice, we will avoid creating new realities. Research can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we will not allow ourselves to venture into the unknown, by assuming that the future will always resemble the past based on our gut feelings, we will never make discoveries. But the benefit of science is that we learn by making mistakes. We now know from experiments that those assertions were wrong. Even Albert Einstein argued, toward the end of his career, for the lack of “spooky action at a distance” in quantum mechanics, and against the existence of black holes and gravitational waves. One inevitably makes mistakes and takes risks when exploring the unknown. This conflict is apparent when the popular view advocated by authority is not aligned with the truth. Is there anything wrong in this progression from childhood curiosity to academic fame? By chasing self-interest, we often lose track of the real goal of academic pursuit: learning about the world. The loud echo amplifies the mentor’s influence in the academic community. To enhance their reputations, tenured professors often tend to create “echo chambers” of students and postdocs who study theses with references to their papers and conference contributions. As senior professors, they can get attached to their egos and navigate in directions that maximize awards, honors, and affiliation with prestigious societies or organizations. These aspects make most childhoods exciting and authentic.īut somewhere along the way, when some of these same kids join academia and are accorded the privilege of tenure, they lose the traits of childhood innocence and unbounded curiosity. As kids, we tolerate mistakes and take risks because these are inseparable from the process of expanding our knowledge base.
There is no bigger privilege to being alive than this learning experience. We are born innocent and humble, wondering about the world around us and trying to figure it out, initially without even having a language to express our findings. The one thing I would change about the world is to transform my colleagues in academia to kids all over again, so they would follow the sincere path of learning about the world. Question: What is one thing wrong with the world that you would change, and why? This is part of a series called Focal Point, in which we ask a range of Harvard faculty members to answer the same question.
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