Ramblemuse Touch Points

My last post quoted from Siegfried Hecker’s testimony on 30 April 2008 before the Water and Energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Hecker’s statement on risk aversion reminded me of a Science editorial by Harold T. Shapiro, “The Willingness to Risk Failure”. Shapiro opened the editorial, drawn from a prior commencement address, with:

Let me focus for a moment on the willingness to take informed risks. The willingness to risk failure is an essential component of most successful initiatives. The unwillingness to face the risks of failure-or an excessive zeal to avoid all risks-is, in the end, an acceptance of mediocrity and an abdication of leadership. To use a sports metaphor, if you do not come to bat at all, or, when at bat, wait hopefully for a walk, you cannot hit a home run. At best, you can get to first base. Major leaguers can decide to play in the minor leagues, and they may have more hits and fewer failures there, but their impact on the game and on society would be very much diminished. The risk of failure is intrinsic to significant accomplishment. Even the great Babe Ruth struck out almost twice as often as he hit home runs. Successful change depends on experimentation with uncertain results. A willingness to occupy new ground always involves the risk of losing your footing along the way.

Now, when you take risks, there is always the chance that things don’t work out simply. If one already knew the outcome, it wouldn’t be research. It also is more likely that one will have to spend some time exploring the “phase space” of the problem for a while — it isn’t just linear implementation. What I’ve seen, over the years, is that schedules have simply become tighter, there is less time to ponder the underlying science, and fewer and fewer colleagues with the knowledge or time to engage in creative discussions. There is also simply less time and little funds to engage in the larger academic world of problem area specific working groups on the national and international arena. So, what I mentioned in my last post about pursuing scientific careers is, at the bottom level, about time, stable funding, and funding agencies willing to take risks on new ideas and people moving between endeavor areas to enable the synthesis of existing knowledge and the creation of new knowledge. It simply isn’t going to happen with fractional person funding and scientists tired out of their skulls with short-term implementation deadlines. Those who get this, in whatever geographical location, will win the competitiveness prize.

Given Harold Shapiro’s use of a baseball metaphor, I also can’t resist adding a quote I picked up years back from a Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory computer center newsletter. This was back when I was a graduate student working on the Livermore Regional Air Quality Model (LIRAQ), with the implementation done at LBL.

The way I see it, you can treat your life like a fastball or a knuckleball, that’s the choice. Now a fastball pitcher grabs tight on the ball, throws it as far as he can, it spins through the air in a straight line, the batter knows where it’s heading and either he can hit it or he can’t. A knuckleball pitcher just lets the ball go, holds it with his middle two knuckles like a claw and lets go, no spin and no straight line. It floats toward the batter and any little breeze can make it do something else, and there’s always a little breeze and the knuckleball surprises the catcher (who has to use a bigger glove and misses a lot anyway), the batter, and the pitcher and the ball. Knuckleball pitchers can pitch a lot more years than fastball pitchers, but there aren’t very many of them. — Anne Herbert.

Writer Anne Herbert (coevolutionary quarterly, whole earth review) is also attributed with coining the phrase “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”