Why Scientists Embrace Being Wrong

Embracing Ignorance to Further Learning

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

Drug development emerges from three distinct points of origin — bench, bedside, and boardroom. Each creates not just different observations but different ways of seeing. The physician-scientist observes the patient at the bedside, the executive maps the market potential of diseases and treatments and the platform scientist begins with technical possibilities seeking their perfect application. Each path valid, each perspective partial.

These distinct domains develop a language and a reality of their own. Each domain using the same word to mean radically different things as suited to its purpose. Efficacy in medicine refers to cure rates in clinical trials. In military terms it refers to the blast radius and lethality of a weapon. An effective picture refers to its emotive power.

When a clinician and executive discuss 'cost,' their different units — lives versus dollars — make the conflict obvious. Far more treacherous are the subtle differences between scientists themselves. Two researchers can discuss 'mechanism' at length before realizing one seeks molecular interactions while the other tracks cellular pathways. These hidden divergences, masked by shared vocabulary, complicate collaboration and confuse the beginner to no end.

The specialized language of each domain comes with its own vast literature. Take lipid nanoparticle research: 170,000 papers in twenty years, hundreds of new studies weekly. Each paper adds vocabulary, nuance, context — the scientific equivalent of new words and idioms in a rapidly evolving language. The very scale seems to demand isolation, to justify speaking only one scientific tongue.

But the novice lives in a strange twilight of knowledge. They work daily with tools and concepts whose origins they've never truly examined, reciting famous names — Watson and Crick — like familiar legends. Yet if the junior researcher asks themselves to trace a viable path of discovery while pretending not to know the double helix, the contrast between knowing conclusions and understanding methods will shake them awake. We mistake our culture's collective knowledge for personal insight, confusing inheritance with understanding — like those born to wealth who never learned its creation.

Science initiates through loss - not the simple loss of illusions, but the harder loss of our comfortable deceptions. The novice researcher arrives wealthy in borrowed knowledge, fluent in a language they haven't earned, surrounded by instruments whose principles they recite but don't grasp. Each day they perform rituals of science without understanding their meaning, like priests reciting prayers in forgotten tongues. The first real experiment is not with chemicals or cells, but with honesty: try to derive what you think you know, trace the path of discovery while pretending not to know its end.

This revelation of ignorance is a hazing rite. It is individual, internal, humiliating, and humorous. Only once complete ignorance is recognized—when utter incompetence is admitted—can scientific training begin. For the primary task of the scientist, secondary only to experimentation itself, is to observe, report, and interpret findings. Self-deception undermines the entire chain of inquiry as it undermines the investigator. For who can be honest with the world but not with themselves?

Naming your ignorance—admitting your understanding is only theatrical—frees the mind. Suddenly, science surrounds and stimulates you. Curiosity and wonder vitalize the body. Conversations become more collaborative, for experts recognize the transition from pretense to inquiry, having undergone it themselves. Genuine questions are met with genuine answers.

Science's first gift is the freedom to be a fool - to ask obvious questions, to admit complete confusion, to face with wonder what we thought we understood. The novice researcher arrives weighed down with borrowed knowledge, reciting mechanisms and models they've never truly examined. Liberation comes through loss - losing the pretense of understanding, the performance of expertise, the comfort of inherited certainty. In this acknowledged ignorance lies the beginning of true investigation. For only the researcher who admits they don't know can begin to learn, only the scientist comfortable with confusion can push beyond current understanding.

The friction of the mind as it pushes against its own narrow boundaries generates such heat that the body starts to sweat while sitting still. This electric excitement of sensing patterns just beyond our current understanding drives us forward — for the sweetest fruits, once held, immediately dissolve into questions, never lasting more than a moment in the light of certainty.

It is with this realization that the young researcher approaches the tower of Babel—knowing that what seemed like different tongues was merely a matter of regional accents. The mother tongue of science is not declaration but question; not mastery but mystery; not grasping but reaching. In darkness, we stretch our small arms toward truths we sense in the night—out of sight, barely out of reach, but never out of mind.And it is here, in this space between knowing and unknowing, that we begin.