相信很多人，特别是研究生被问到自己从事的专业有何用处。我读硕士研究生的时候，经常拿个塑料盆，扛个T型网，用于水生昆虫采集。常常有放学的小朋友，好奇地问我在干什么？是不是抓鱼的？这样好奇的问题，随着观众年岁的增长，好奇的问题越来越少。更多的人则问：你抓/研究这些虫子有什么用？我和研究组的成员研究蜜蜂总科的分类，最多被问的问题是：哪类蜂蜜最好、最安全？而很少有人关心这类昆虫对农业、林业的重要传粉功能和巨大价值。至于和人类共生存、同样面临环境问题的这些物种有多少？如何应对气候变化、水体污染、土壤污染、人类干扰、生境破碎化等基础问题，那就更加少有人会关心了。 这类问题一直萦绕在我和我的同事周围，并逐渐在经费申请的各类标书，在科学意义之外，增加了社会经济价值贡献评估。显然好奇心驱动到实用驱动，在现今的社会和科学团体普遍存在。好在我们总是对自然世界充满好奇心，对自己研究的对象及其知识充满敬畏：知识不是为了饭碗和职业而存在，无所谓有用或无用。知识就是力量，未知犹在，永续求索。 下面刊载在《New Scientists》上的书评指出：研究不是为了拥有某种力量，而是为了创造值得保护和流传的文明。 REVIEW 15 March 2017 How we lost the world-changing power of useless knowledge Intellectual freedom was the founding principle of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton – something we lack the confidence to do now, show two new books Luminaries at the Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s Photographer unknown. From the Shelby White and Leon Levy Archives By Simon Ings IN 1930, the US educator Abraham Flexner set up the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research centre in Princeton, New Jersey, where leading lights as diverse as Albert Einstein and T. S. Eliot could pursue their studies, free from everyday pressures. For Flexner, the world was richer than the imagination could conceive and wider than ambition could encompass. The universe was full of gifts and this was why pure, “blue sky” research could not help but turn up practical results now and again, of a sort quite impossible to plan for. So, in his 1939 essay “The usefulness of useless knowledge”, Flexner listed a few of the practical gains that have sprung from what we might, with care, term scholastic noodling. Electromagnetism was his favourite. We might add quantum physics. Even as his institute opened its doors, the world’s biggest planned economy, the Soviet Union, was conducting a grand and opposite experiment, harnessing all the sciences for their immediate utility and problem-solving ability. During the cold war, the vast majority of Soviet scientists were reduced to mediocrity, given only sharply defined engineering problems to solve. Flexner’s better-known affiliates, meanwhile, garnered reputations akin to those enjoyed by other mascots of Western intellectual liberty: abstract-expressionist artists and jazz musicians. At a time when academia is once again under pressure to account for itself, the Princeton University Press reprint of Flexner’s essay is timely. Its preface, however, is another matter. Written by current institute director Robbert Dijkgraaf, it exposes our utterly instrumental times. For example, he employs junk metrics such as “more than half of all economic growth comes from innovation”. What for Flexner was a rather sardonic nod to the bottom line, has become for Dijkgraaf the entire argument – as though “pure research” simply meant “long-term investment”, and civic support came not from existential confidence and intellectual curiosity, but from scientists “sharing the latest discoveries and personal stories”. So much for escaping quotidian demands. “The structures throttling today’s scholars come not from Soviet-style planning, but market principles” We do not know what the tightening of funding for scientific research that has taken place over the past 40 years would have done for Flexner’s own sense of noblesse oblige. But this we can be sure of: utilitarian approaches to higher education are dominant now, to the point of monopoly. The administrative burdens and stultifying oversight structures throttling today’s scholars come not from Soviet-style central planning, but from the application of market principles – an irony that the sociologist Lawrence Busch explores exhaustively in his monograph Knowledge for Sale. Busch explains how the first neo-liberal thinkers sought to prevent the rise of totalitarian regimes by replacing governance with markets. Those thinkers believed that markets were safer than governments because they were cybernetic and so corrected themselves. Right? Wrong: Busch provides ghastly disproofs of this neo-liberal vision from within the hall of academe, from bad habits such as a focus on counting citations and publication output, through fraud, to existential crises such as the shift in the ideal of education from a public to a private good. But if our ingenious, post-war market solution to the totalitarian nightmare of the 1940s has itself turned out to be a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity (as journalist Matt Taibbi once described investment bank Goldman Sachs), where have we left to go? Flexner’s solution requires from us a confidence that is hard to muster right now. We have to remember that the point of study is not to power, enable, de-glitch or otherwise save civilisation. The point of study is to create a civilisation worth saving. The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge Abraham Flexner, companion essay by Robbert Dijkgraaf Princeton University Press Knowledge for Sale: The neoliberal takeover of higher education Lawrence Busch MIT Press This article appeared in print under the headline “The power of useless” Article amended on 17 March 2017 The Institute for Advanced Study is an independent research centre in Princeton, New Jersey
按：这篇文章是我在2011年五一节假期翻译的，当时何毓琦院士刚刚贴上此文，刚读第一条就觉得特别适合我的胃口又很有启发，自己又喜爱翻译，一时兴起便把它翻译了出来。译完贴在自己的新浪博客上，访问量不多就没怎么管它。直到今年7月份和科学网上和蔼的建兰阿姨聊天，她提醒我可以把此文放在科学网上和大家分享，才又花了一个上午再次修改了一下，在修改的过程中自己也得到了不少启发。 《纽约时报星期日版》 （NYT，7/4/2011）的商业版上有一篇用上面标题的头条文章（NYT采访了100多位大公司的CEO们。下面描述的5条品质是这些CEO们一致同意的观点）。因为我没有也不想成为一家大的商业公司或机构的总裁，下面就让我以一名在学术界算得上成功的普通学者的个人经历出发，来为那些也有志于做学术的年轻学者诠释一下这5条品质吧。 强烈的求知欲 这点在我看来是最重要的品质。我的妻子曾经开玩笑说过我墓碑上的墓志铭应该是“他想知道”,因为她经常被我不停地对每件事问“为什么”和“怎么样”搞得很烦恼。在我人生的这个阶段，即使已经没有任何经济或职业上的必要去学习和发现新的知识，但我依然出于求知欲和对知识的总的兴趣去参加数不清的研讨会和讲座。这些会议在哥伦比亚大学、麻省理工、哈佛里非常多。就在上周，我花了五个工作日中的三天参加了一个计算机科学的年会和一个保密/安全的会议。这些议题都超出了我主要的专业兴趣和专长。对，我可能不会因我所学到的去做些什么，或许在几个月后我就忘掉了里面的大多数内容。但是仅仅是因为我现在退休了有时间，并且我发现参与其中很有意思而且很受启发。在我看来，一个没有这种强烈的求知欲的人不可能成为一个成功的学者。 思维的简洁性 我曾经不止一次说过所有有价值的想法或发现在它们被人们彻底搞懂后都是简洁的。一个人必须尽力尝试从最简洁的层次去解释事情但不可以把问题过分简单化。我对学生最多的忠告是“你应该能够在从你的读者角度看来合适的任意时间内解释任何事情”。我所有的试题都是开卷的并且不会包含复杂的计算或一个复杂公式的推导。因为一个人想概念上严谨清晰并不需要知道高深的数学理论。尝试着去简化思想可以加深他对这些思想的理解程度。如果没有简化和统一，人类的知识经过一个个世纪的积累后，迟早会变成一项不可承担的重负。 团队精神 尽管一些科学研究是一个人承担的。但是没有人可以孤军奋战。现代的科学研究常常是一个团队的项目。以一个人的水平，（在从事这些科学研究时）你必须学会和你的研究生和博士后一起工作。更深一步讲，在分享荣誉方面要表现得慷慨些，不去无缘无故地攫取别人的劳动成果可以让你生活更放松还可以在日后避免一些冲突和尴尬。 自信 不同的人在他们人生的不同阶段对他们的决定有不同的自信度。即使有些自信不太合理，但是一个人如果没有它是不可能坚持下去一件事的。在我早期的“扰动分析”思想的研究中，我受到了各种各样的批评和攻击（ http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=spaceuid=1565do=blogid=29014page=2 ），然而我和其他信徒坚持了下去，最后我们赢得了肯定。科学界还有许多其他有相似经历的科学发现有名的例子。 无畏 这是上面提到的“自信”品质的另一方面。我把它解释为不害怕去尝试新的想法和知识的新领域。虽然在已经搭好框架的领域工作会很舒服，然而在一个新领域工作的回报会大得多。第一个涉足，你就可以轻松地摘到那些低处的果实，而后来者则需要费特别大的力气才能摘到那些悬在高出的却和你的一样的果实。 NYT的文章指出上面的5个品质都不是与生俱来的，都是可以通过后天的训练和勤奋习得的，而这无疑是个好消息。 原文： The Sunday NY Times (4/17/2011) has a lead article in her business section with the above title (NYT interviewed over 100 CEOs of major corporations. The five qualities described below are the unanimous opinion of all of the CEOs.). While I have no experience as nor do I aspire to be the president of a major business or institution, let me interpret these qualities from my own experience as a average reasonably successful academic for young scholars aspiring to be the same. Passionate Curiosity This above is in my opinion the most important quality. My wife jokingly have said that the epitaph on tombstone should be “he wants to know” since she sometimes gets frustrated by my incessant questioning of the “why” and “how” of everything. Even though at this stage in my life there are no financial or career incentive of any kind to learn or discover new knowledge, I still go to the numerous seminars and lectures which are abundant in the Cambridge/MIT/Harvard environ just out of curiosity and general interest. Just last week I spend three of the five weekdays attending a computer science symposium and a privacy/security conference. These subjects are outside of my main professional interest and expertise. True, I may not do anything with what I learned nor will probably remember most of them several months later. But just because I now have the time in retirement, I find participating in them enjoyable and stimulating. Without this curiosity, one cannot be a successful scholar in my opinion. Simplicity in thought I have repeatedly said that all worthwhile ideas and discovery are simple once they are thoroughly understood. One must strive to explain things at the simplest level possible but not to the point of being simplistic.My favoriteurging tostudents is "you should be able to explain anything to anybody in any amount of time at thelevel appropriate for the reader". All my examination questions are open book and involve no complex calculations or derivation of complicated formula. One does not need advanced mathematics to be conceptually rigorous. Trying to simplify ideas deepens one’s own understanding of them. Without simplification and unification, the accumulation of human knowledge through the centuries will soon become an impossible burden Team Spirit Although some scientific endeavors are truly a solitary undertaking. But no man is an island. Modern research often is a team project. On a human level, one must learn to work with your research students and postdoctoral fellows. Furthermore, in being generous with credit sharing and not undeservedly taking credit from others’ work makes life much more relaxed and avoids conflicts and embarrassments later. Confidence in oneself. Different people learn to have confidence in their own decisions at different stages in their lives. Even though sometimes this may be misplaced confidence, without this one cannot persist in an endeavor. In the early days of my research in the idea of “perturbation analysis”, I was subject to all kinds of criticism and attack ( http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=spaceuid=1565do=blogid=29014page=2 ) , yet I and other believers persisted and finally won acknowledgement. There are many well known examples of scientific discovery that share the same experience Fearlessness This is another aspect of the” confidence” quality mentioned above. I interpret this as not afraid to try out new ideas and new fields of knowledge. While it is very comfortable to work within a well established framework, the payoff is much greater in a new topic. Being there first, you get to pick the low hanging fruits easily while the late comer must exert much more effort to get the same on thehigher branches ( http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=spaceuid=1565do=blogid=2224 ) . The NYT article concludes with the good news that all five qualities above are not genetic or inborn and can be learned through discipline and diligence. 原文链接： http://blog.sciencenet.cn/home.php?mod=spaceuid=1565do=blogid=434766cid=2035355 感谢何毓琦老先生的美文与支持！
标签: 求知
