The Value of Bewilderment

Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild, was the lot of the explorer….

Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver.

Consider discovery from the point of view of research and exploration. Columbus and Shackleton–these were explorers, not researchers. And when they were most bewildered, one might expect they stood the best chance of making discoveries. In fact, the primary point of exploring might be to get bewildered. Even folks like Darwin went of voyages led by explorers so they could participate in the bewildering along with the explorers.

Contrast that to research now. Not research in the abstract, but research based on proposals in response to calls for proposals drafted by panels of other researchers.  No one admits to being bewildered. That would be the worst thing to do. Perhaps one of the biggest problems with innovation from research these days is no one is sufficiently bewildered to discover. Perhaps we need to have an office of *exploration administration* and provide resources for folks willing to get to the very edge of the known, and then further, not knowing what they will find or do, except for perhaps the aim of getting back alive.

For that kind of work, no panel of unbewildered experts could possibly know what an explorer’s proposal would even look like.

Regardless of how the government chooses to fund projects, universities should be looking to exploration and not particularly research–at least not research as currently practiced in universities–for discovery and innovation. The whole idea of bringing research under the control of university bureaucrats suggests there will be no real discoveries there. The gutty thing, the thing that the community needs, is that expert folks launch out and become bewildered.

If we want to look at natural history of innovation, perhaps the proper starting point is not invention but bewilderment. For that, what’s the expedition to the unknown, and who is willing to go along?