L’électron libre

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Research papers often present interesting results to the community by mentioning alongside the conditions under which they obtained these results.

It is not generally advised to bring up the thousands of tries (generally failures) with a comprehensive list of the changes of parameters to obtain incrementally something successful.

Some of those changes you do in experimental research may or may not yield any interesting improvement. But if people get to an interesting point, this was through mistakes and improvements made by a distinct subset of all the changes they tried. Add to this subset all the reproducible tries that led to something maybe interesting or funny but not in fact what you are looking for.

These useless cause-consequence facts are useless and useful at the same time, it all depends whether or not you value saving other people’s time and maybe direct them on new unexplored tracks. On thing is for sure, these cause-consequence facts (micro-failures, micro-improvements, or accidents) are generally not documented in papers, and end up stored in individual souls, taken as rubbish knowledge…re-discovered on and on everyday by other people whom won’t share that either…and so on.

You see coming the idea that some people’s rubbish is other people’s gold. What is not useful to you maybe to another with other objectives. But instead, research papers barely present the log of their scientific approach. It is just not in the current trend to do so. But would it be against any of the aims of research? Think about it, and find me ONE reason why it cannot become a requirement of research papers. Why do we only require success experimental conditions and not failure experimental conditions? To me one or the other provides just as much wonder, but effort is only made on explaining why things work. Wouldn’t we be stuck if a naive seven year old genuinely asked “But WHY, WHY does it not work?”. There is more failures in this world than there is successes, and because our emotional response differs when exposed to each, we mistakenly grant more importance to explaining why things work and overlook the eventuality of applying that very same scientific approach to failures.

The authors and publishing authorities may hold too much pride in accepting to show the whole world their unconfident or seemingly numerous ridiculous tries and the subsequent failures. “It would be masochism” some may say.

We do learn from our mistakes. But in innovation and research, where everyone is dedicated to contributing to something in science, would it not be a good thing to learn from the mistakes of each other as well?

In innovation class, I was taught that failure is okay as long as you learn from it. Once the lesson learnt it becomes knowledge. Therefore if mistakes are knowledge, how come it is not shared? I was also taught the importance of recycling knowledge, but more more on individual basis than on a community basis.

How many researchers, at some point of time, are doing for their first time a process that is well known by another? Quite many, yes. What is the point in doing the exact same mistakes to reach the exact same conclusions?

Of course a good literature review may provide you with documentation. But let’s say you’re doing exploratory research, the way to achieve your goal will by definition not be documented. Nonetheless, you could get elements that help you reach them, had they been documented when “uselessly” found by others…

In a nutshell, the useless knowledge of others, if shared, may be very useful for you, if not be a pillar of your experimentation conditions.

In this fashion, had there been widespread tools of Knowledge Management, it would be interesting to ask researchers, FOR THEIR OWN BENEFIT, to contribute by documenting all their processes no matter what they yield. Thus, cause-consequence phenomenons would be stored and will benefit the community. This hidden part of the iceberg is to be considered just as must as we consider the importance of the research papers themselves.

Such a tool would be a great assistant for innovation. Innovation is the result of a certain sort of intelligence, that resides in the ability to make links between things. To a very large extent, this process of linking things can be aided by computers shall someone develop the tools to extract and yield on-demand knowledge, especially the cause-consequence facts in technological processes.