Hamming and Mills on research and scholarship

Richard Hamming and C. Wright Mills each made helpful contributions on the strategy and the craft of research, scholarship and writing. Hamming conveyed the results of his experience and research in a long talk which can also be found in a short form (Google Hamming+your research). He offered suggestions for people who want to do work that makes a difference, in contrast with the average paper which is read by the author, the referee, and perhaps one other person. The Mills contribution is an appendix to his book The Sociological Imagination.

Hamming observed many outstanding thinkers at close range, notably Feynman and others in the Mannhattan Project and Shannon (a great pioneer of information theory) when they shared a room at the Bell Telephone Laboratories.

His advice in a nutshell: Work on the right problem at the right time in the right way.

Choosing the problem

He emphasised the need to work on the important problems in the field at the time, so the best scientists will have a list of those problems, they will constantly review the list to re-set priorities, and they will focus on a problem where there appears to be an opening or an “attack”, as he called it. He suggested to be careful about the company we keep, aim to spend time with people who are themselves working on major problems and who are willing to share ideas about them.

“I begin with the choice of problem. Most scientists spend almost all of their time working on problems that even they admit are neither great or are likely to lead to great work; hence, almost surely, they will not do important work.”

At the Bell Telephone Laboratories he ate lunch with the mathematicians for some time until he found that they were not serious enough so he moved on to dine at the physics table. That was good for a few years until the Nobel Prize, promotions, and offers from other companies took their toll and he shifted to the chemistry table.

“At first I asked what were the important problems in chemistry, then what important problems they were working on, or problems that might lead to important results. One day I asked, “if what they were working on was not important, and was not likely to lead to important things, they why were they working on them?” After that I had to eat with the engineers!”

Personal characteristics

On personal traits, he nominated high levels of activity and energy, emotional commitment, willingness to go “the extra mile”, courage and the ability to tolerate ambiguity.

“There is another trait that took me many years to notice, and that is the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Most people want to believe what they learn is the truth: there are a few people who doubt everything. If you believe too much then you are not likely to find the essentially new view that transforms a field, and if you doubt too much you will not be able to do much at all. It is a fine balance between believing what you learn and at the same time doubting things. Great steps forward usually involve a change of viewpoint to outside the standard ones in the field.”

For that reason, he was impressed by the way that transforming steps often came from outsiders; he instanced carbon dating which came came from physics and the first airplane was built by the Wright brothers who were bicycle experts.

Arthur Koestler in “The Act of Creation” developed a theory to account for scientific discovery by way of a “bisociation of matrices” or in other words the intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas from different fields. This accounts for the fertility of interdisciplinary work and the phenomenon that someone described in terms of “the poacher (the intruder who should not be there) getting the fattest rabbits”.

Liam Hudson speculated on the characteristics of original thinkers in the concluding pages of his book Contrary Imaginations. He listed persistence, self-confidence and predatoriness. The successful scientists is likely to be adventurous, something of a swashbuckler, quoting from Freud.

I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador (italics) – an adventurer, if you want to translate the word – with all the curiosity, the boldness, the tenacity that belongs to that type of being.

Selling  

When the work is done, then there is a need for selling, something that many scientists find beneath them. The good scientist will become expert in three types of presentations, first the major paper (preferably in a high impact journal), second the short summary presentation and the “on your feet” contribution in the heat of discussion at conferences and seminars.

No one ever told me the kinds of things I have just related to you; I had to find them out for myself. Since I have now told you how to succeed, you have no excuse for not trying and doing great work in your chosen field.

Intellectual craftsmanship

Moving on to C. Wright Mills “On Intellectual Craftsmanship“. This is written for serious scholars and researchers who regard themselves as a part of a classic tradition, for whom “soial science is the practice of a craft”. The practice of this craft is an integral part of life; “scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of a career”.

This calls for serious organization and a certain amount of “life planning”, starting with a set of files which function like the journal of the creative writer. In the file “there is joined personal experiences and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned”. The file has to be under constant review, storing personal experiences and drafts of material that will eventually find their way into project plans and publications.

As for plans, he deplored the usual practice of planning in the course writing grant applications. These are more like PR than serious planning, angling to get funds for topics that are fashionable, fitting the prevailing paradigm, maybe “politically correct” or “trendy” (not terms he used).

A scientist in full flight should have so many plans, or ideas, that the problem is – which to work on at any given time? “He should keep a special little file for his master agenda, which he writes and rewrites just for himself and perhaps for discussion with friends. From time to time he ought to review this very carefully and purposefully, and sometimes, too, when he is relaxed.”

Three interludes

In a flourishing intellectual community there will be interludes of discussion about future work.

“Three kinds of interludes – on problems, methods, theory – ought to come out of the work of social scientists, and lead into it again; they should be shaped by the work in progress and to some extent guide that work”.

As work proceeds over the years and decades the files will multiply into sets and subsets reflecting work that is being completed and published, work in progress, work that is seriously planned and more nebulous and speculative ideas that may bear fruit if an “attack” turns up.

The files will contain masses of notes based on reading and Mills explained the various types of reading, and the various types of notes that are required at the different stages of a project, illustrated by his own series of books on the various strata of US sciety, possibly inspired by the French novelist Balzac who set to write stories about life at levels of society in France at his time.

As to the conditions of work, like Hamming he commented on the need to cultivate good friends and professional associates, people who will listen and talk, even including imaginary characters!

“I try to surround myself with all the relevant environment- socia and intellectual – that I think might lead me into thinking well along the lines of my work. That is one meaning of my remarks above on the fusion of personal and intellectual life”.

One of the tasks of research in sociology as Mill practiced it is to shuttle back and forth between the classic work in the field and the contemporary literature. Out of this dialectic comes the quest for information to test his ideas. He was under no illusion about starting with facts and one of the chapters in The Sociological Imagination is a crushing critique of “Abstracted Empiricism”. Another chapter is an equally devastating criticism of “Grand Theory” that is not controlled by testing.

“There is no more virtue in empirical inquiry as such than in reading a book. The purpose of empirical inquiry is to settle disagreements and doubts about facts, and thus to make arguments more fruitful by basing all sides more substantively. Facts discipline reason; but reason is the advance guard in any field of learning“. (my emphasis).

Of course he was using reason in the broad sense to include imagination and the use of the mind in all sorts of ways.

Writing: themes and topics

Mills addressed the task of writing up the book (which he assumed to be the outcome of the project) in terms of themes and topics (a distinction which he attributed to a great editor, Lambert Davis). A topic is a subject which might be treated in a chapter of the book. The order of chapters brings up the issue of themes.

“A theme is an idea, usually of some signal trend, some master conception, or a key distinction, like rationality and reason, for example. In working out the construction of a book, when you come to realise the two or three, or as the case may be, the six or seven themes, then you will know that you are on top of the job. ”

These themes will keep turning up in connection with the different topics, they may appear to be repetitious, they may at first be confused and poorly formulated.

“What you must do is sort them out and state them in a general way as clearly and briefly as you can…cross classify them with the full range of the topics…At some point all the themes should appear together, in relation to one another…maybe at the beginning of the book, certainly near the end…It is easier to write about this than to do it, for it is usully not so mechanical a matter as it may appear…Sometimes you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded of course by methodological introductions to methodolgy, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are indeed quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility”.

Communication

“To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose. It is much less important to study grammar and Anglo-Saxon roots than to clarify your answers to these three questions: (1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject? (2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself? (3) For whom am I trying to write?”

This is probably the time to re-read George Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language.

People who are serious about research and writing could do worse than re-visit the Hamming and Mills papers and Orwell’s essay every four or five years to check that we are on track and getting the small things right, as football coaches like to say.