Paper, Rocks, and Research

I was asked to be a guest lecturer in a graduate research class. The professor wanted me to give an introduction to graduate level research. As I was preparing for the lecture, I thought a youtube video might assist the class in their learning. Hence, the above video.

What does this video have to do with research? While watching the video, my mind quickly jumped to a metalogue written by Gregory Bateson (1953) entitled Metalogue: How Much Do You Know? Below is an excerpt between Bateson and his daughter.

“ Daughter: Daddy—has anybody ever measured how much anybody knew?

Father: Oh yes. Often. But I don’t quite know what the answers meant. They do it with examinations and tests and quizzes, but it’s like trying to find out how big a piece of paper is by throwing stones at it.

Daughter: How do you mean?

Father: I mean – if you throw stones at two pieces of paper from the same distance and you find that you hit one piece more often than the other, then probably the one that you hit most will be bigger than the other. In the same way, in an examination you throw a lot of questions at the students, and if you find that you hit more pieces of knowledge in one student than in the others, then you think that student must know more. That’s the idea.

Daughter: But could one measure a piece of paper that way?

Father: Surely one could. It might even be quite a good way of doing it. We do measure a lot of things that way. For example, we judge how strong a cup of coffee is by looking to see how black it is - - that is, we look to see how much light is stopped. We throw light waves at it instead of stones, it’s the same idea.”

I think research is similar to this idea. We manipulate and ‘test’ humans and fit them into categories that we’ve already created. We throw rocks at them and when we hit the same idea over and over, we treat it as scientific understanding. We fail to step back and consider that we may be throwing the rock in such a way that it will always hit the one piece of paper. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that piece of paper is bigger, it may only mean that we have a tendency to throw rocks in one particular direction.