The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research: aka.... "How The Gait Guys feel much of the time"
/We started The Gait Guys in some ways because despite all of the questions we asked over the years, from those who we all deemed as “those who are supposed to know”, we rarely got answers that we felt were sufficient for our thirst.
We had the research data that everyone else had, but no one was helping us put together a big picture that made sense or had reasonable clinical outcomes. We are on a journey here at The Gait Guys. A journey based on the honesty and truth behind how the human body ambulates, the parameters that are necessary for it to work right, and what happens when things go wrong.
In the mean time, we share the conclusion statement of this journal article (link) . It pretty much sums up how Ivo and I feel from time to time. We hope you enjoy the reality of the statement.
____________________________________________
“Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.” -Martin A. Schwartz
________________________________________________________
The key to the statement above was …. ” as long as we learn something each time”. Otherwise, according to Einstein, we would be considered insane.
Technology and medicine are moving at light speed our dear brethren. This is why we start our weekly podcast (LINK) with a neuroscience piece and link the new science and technology discoveries to gait and human movement. Because we would all be stupid not to look forward under the exponential growth paradigm that is today’s reality.
Have a good week everyone…….we have some great stuff queued up for the week, hope you get a little out of it all.
- We remain……..The Gait Guys……two “productively and comfortably stupid” gentlemen.
