Doing Research, as modeled by fictional detective Harry Bosch
I have been reading a detective novel by Michael Connelly, The Crossing. The detective here is Harry Bosch, named after Hieronymous B, played by Titus Welliver on TV (Welliver's father is a very well known painter, Neil Welliver). Bosch is using his skills to solve a case with limited help from the criminal justice system, so he is working more explicitly. Some lessons:
1. Pay attention to your hunches. Hunches arise subliminally from one's examination of evidence and records. It's what you noticed but were not aware of, or what was missing. Hunches are very different from prejudices, the latter derived not from the actual material and evidence and records.
2. Look for the ghosts. What's missing, what is the world telling you that you barely notice or hear?
3. Attend to lacunae and, conversely, connections. If something is missing it is perhaps not by accident, so find out why and perhaps what it is. If two situations would appear to be only randomly related, perhaps there is a connection between them.
4. In the end, your hunches have to bear fruit, your ghosts have to show themselves, your lacunae are discovered, the connections are made. Or not. But just as in scholarly work, in court your case must be a matter of evidence and argument. So not only do you follow #1-3, you make them concrete, specific and real.
I may update this list as I read more.
5. Assume that the world is not on your side trying to make your research easier. Records and documents and data are likely to be polluted and corrupted and need lots of work. In this mystery, the murder book that is provided to the defense counsel is likely to have been printed with little toner in the copier and the paper shuffled. Moreover, in retrospect, it is all in the data or the murder book, but only in retrospect. As you learn more along the way, your data will speak to you differently.
6. Assume that stuff is connected and not must random. Of course, you have to convince others of that but you have to at first be open to that possibility. (Of course, there is randomness in the data, but you are saying to yourself, it might all make some sense, the R-squared need not be so small.
7. There are always lacunae and missing stuff. If you think something is missing, spend time to find out if you might find it. And as in #6, assume that the world is consistent, as a working principle, in that apparent inconsistencies might in fact be explained in a sensible way. [Much of what I say sounds different than what you learn in a statistics environment, or when you are learning research methods. There is the idea is to prevent you from making poorly founded claims. Here, I want you to have some interesting claims to think about and find evidence for, or against.]
8. Causation usually requires a nexus where the consequences meet the sources. Look for it. That may involve some ingenious theorizing. Again, you may have gone too far, too far out on a limb. But all your research methods will allow you to discover just how far. Again, the problem is to have interesting ideas. Experience tells you when your ingenuity is in fact poppycock
My point here: I am not saying that scholarly work is detection as practiced by the police and Sherlock Holmes. Rather, there may be lessons to be extracted from these fictional stories. I have no idea if actual detectives work as does Harry Bosch. Rather, his way of working may be useful in doing our work.
9. There will be loose ends and unexplained details. Surely, you should allow for such. But tracking down the loose ends, the unexplained, may well prove fruitful. Of course, in a constructed world like a novel, that fruitfulness is the essence of plot and surprise. But, still, this is not a poor strategy in actual work. Again, your judgment about when things may not matter and be left aside will develop in time.
10. A defense lawyer thinks about the trial and what can be disproved or proven in that context. The detective is presumably looking for the truth. A scholar is both a defense lawyer, making a case and challenging the usual claims, and a detective, seeking to find out the truth.
11. You want to see the scene of the action, talk to some people who are relevant to your study, and in general get a sense of ground truth. Your data surely needs to be cleaned up, and your analytic techniques need to be of high quality. But, actual contact with the actual world is likely to give you a sense of what matters, which findings might be significant, and what is surprising in what you are discovering. Go out and look, talk to people, be in the relevant situations. Even if you are studying a closed society, you need to find some way of getting access to that reality.
12. As a scholar, in a university bureaucracy, in a research community, you are not so free to follow you instincts. Why? The others in your field and research community will not let you get away with going too far off the standard tracks, unless you not only have tenure, but do not need others approval or salary raises. Still, maybe, 10% of the time it might be worth it, to follow your instincts even if they are quite idiosyncratic. Of course, if you have proven time and again, that your idiosyncracy has been productive, you can get away with a lot. [Albert Einstein surely had been productive and idiosyncratic, but it is not clear that his instincts about combining the theories of gravity and electricity (that "unified field theory") served him well. We now have something like such a theory in the Standard Model of particle physics combined with some form of string theory or something else, but surely we are not close to anything like such a unified theory--although we do have a unified field theory of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions (that Standard Model).
1. Pay attention to your hunches. Hunches arise subliminally from one's examination of evidence and records. It's what you noticed but were not aware of, or what was missing. Hunches are very different from prejudices, the latter derived not from the actual material and evidence and records.
2. Look for the ghosts. What's missing, what is the world telling you that you barely notice or hear?
3. Attend to lacunae and, conversely, connections. If something is missing it is perhaps not by accident, so find out why and perhaps what it is. If two situations would appear to be only randomly related, perhaps there is a connection between them.
4. In the end, your hunches have to bear fruit, your ghosts have to show themselves, your lacunae are discovered, the connections are made. Or not. But just as in scholarly work, in court your case must be a matter of evidence and argument. So not only do you follow #1-3, you make them concrete, specific and real.
I may update this list as I read more.
5. Assume that the world is not on your side trying to make your research easier. Records and documents and data are likely to be polluted and corrupted and need lots of work. In this mystery, the murder book that is provided to the defense counsel is likely to have been printed with little toner in the copier and the paper shuffled. Moreover, in retrospect, it is all in the data or the murder book, but only in retrospect. As you learn more along the way, your data will speak to you differently.
6. Assume that stuff is connected and not must random. Of course, you have to convince others of that but you have to at first be open to that possibility. (Of course, there is randomness in the data, but you are saying to yourself, it might all make some sense, the R-squared need not be so small.
7. There are always lacunae and missing stuff. If you think something is missing, spend time to find out if you might find it. And as in #6, assume that the world is consistent, as a working principle, in that apparent inconsistencies might in fact be explained in a sensible way. [Much of what I say sounds different than what you learn in a statistics environment, or when you are learning research methods. There is the idea is to prevent you from making poorly founded claims. Here, I want you to have some interesting claims to think about and find evidence for, or against.]
8. Causation usually requires a nexus where the consequences meet the sources. Look for it. That may involve some ingenious theorizing. Again, you may have gone too far, too far out on a limb. But all your research methods will allow you to discover just how far. Again, the problem is to have interesting ideas. Experience tells you when your ingenuity is in fact poppycock
My point here: I am not saying that scholarly work is detection as practiced by the police and Sherlock Holmes. Rather, there may be lessons to be extracted from these fictional stories. I have no idea if actual detectives work as does Harry Bosch. Rather, his way of working may be useful in doing our work.
9. There will be loose ends and unexplained details. Surely, you should allow for such. But tracking down the loose ends, the unexplained, may well prove fruitful. Of course, in a constructed world like a novel, that fruitfulness is the essence of plot and surprise. But, still, this is not a poor strategy in actual work. Again, your judgment about when things may not matter and be left aside will develop in time.
10. A defense lawyer thinks about the trial and what can be disproved or proven in that context. The detective is presumably looking for the truth. A scholar is both a defense lawyer, making a case and challenging the usual claims, and a detective, seeking to find out the truth.
11. You want to see the scene of the action, talk to some people who are relevant to your study, and in general get a sense of ground truth. Your data surely needs to be cleaned up, and your analytic techniques need to be of high quality. But, actual contact with the actual world is likely to give you a sense of what matters, which findings might be significant, and what is surprising in what you are discovering. Go out and look, talk to people, be in the relevant situations. Even if you are studying a closed society, you need to find some way of getting access to that reality.
12. As a scholar, in a university bureaucracy, in a research community, you are not so free to follow you instincts. Why? The others in your field and research community will not let you get away with going too far off the standard tracks, unless you not only have tenure, but do not need others approval or salary raises. Still, maybe, 10% of the time it might be worth it, to follow your instincts even if they are quite idiosyncratic. Of course, if you have proven time and again, that your idiosyncracy has been productive, you can get away with a lot. [Albert Einstein surely had been productive and idiosyncratic, but it is not clear that his instincts about combining the theories of gravity and electricity (that "unified field theory") served him well. We now have something like such a theory in the Standard Model of particle physics combined with some form of string theory or something else, but surely we are not close to anything like such a unified theory--although we do have a unified field theory of strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions (that Standard Model).
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