Red Pill's Self Service

I have to make a confession: "I love to do research!"

In my job I not only can commit mistakes, but I have to. I am very happy to say that many or most of the programs I did, just not meet my expectations.
Not that I was happy at the moment, but after sometime thinking and philosophizing about the solution I got into something that might be right.
As one of my professors said, an unexpected result is not rarely a better result. 

What then? Then it is time to make another mistake. As I said, mistakes are the rule and the more I found the better I understand it.
C'mon, I dont believe in childhood all you guys believed in your mom at the first time you saw fire. Man, after seem that huge ball of incandescence pleasure with the eyes, nothing can stop a baby from putting a hand on it. I surely did tried it once.
Well if you havent, shame on you. You will never know the feeling of burning by fire. Although you can take a more orthodox position and say that fire would only cause pain and so on, I would like to remind you that this feeling can help you understand other feelings as well. And you can even extrapolate the feeling to other occasions to a certain extent. Yes, we have a model of sensations and we do can predict feelings.

Fire may not be a good example. Anyway, someday ago I for the first time I eat beet. It was nice and I learned to appreciate it in most of my days. For me it was not a big deal, but imagine if I was a cook. That could have changed my life.

What does that have to do with research? Everything, I learn the more I try it. Every experience, even a small one. And the things I did wrong not only help me understand what I do, but help me change what I do!
I would love if more people could feel this too, but sadly we learn two bad behaviors in school:
1. One is not to do mistakes (which is a terrible mistake per se).
2. To have too much clarity.

To counter the first one, we can listen to Socrates: "the knowledge come from the inside". We have to ask ourselves questions (Socratic Method). I myself can only think of learning as an iterative process. And avoid doing mistakes means stop learning. Human beings learn to like the latter and avoid the first, while they end up losing both without noticing it. (Just some little digression, we borrowed so much from Greece, but forgotten all the principles of education throughout the process. Just to remind us, the principles of education in Ancient Greece focused on the the mind, body, and imagination. We just forgot about the last two and modified the first one to fit in our economic system)

The second one,  I do not need to say much I think. The quote of David Wolpert says it all: "To purchase insight you must pay beforehand, in confusion". He is a senior research scientist at NASA, which worked on  understanding optimization (in fact, part of his work was misunderstood, he even has an article to clarify it).

I love the idea of every step I do may prove everything I believe wrong. What then? Learn with it. More than that, learn that the process is this. And if you are doing everything right, you are just not doing anything new.
Some people told me that the majority of the people cannot bare to have every believe being rebuild from the scratch every single time. My answer is simple, we can bare it. And in fact there is a little thing that can help the process, just do the opposite. If you do not like something, get near it, do it, become a master on it. Then rethink, is it still wrong? How is it?

I do not mean for every single thing we do not like that we should become a master in it. No no. Some things may be excluded from simple logic, others are just waste of time and recreate the wheel. But there are certain problems which you do not like, but cant really prove them wrong to yourself.
I did this with so many things. So many things I hated and became good at them to prove they wrong.  At the end? Well, I just proved me wrong or I proved they are really wrong. Both changed my life, both were nice.
When I proved myself wrong, then I just forgot about everything I believed which was proved wrong and start from a new basis. I advise you, this path may seem painful, however, it is in disguise very rewarding. You not only changed for the better, but you cannot forget your experiences and you will be forever conscious of the valley were you walked. More than that, the valley may give hints of what is better now, which the other people not have a single idea. It is the red pill.

I recognize few jobs let people free to take the red pill many times. Learning to live with the mistakes is a rewarding experience I wanted to share. Right now, I have two research lines. One going against the other. One have to fail? Not at all, in the world there is still place for the red and the blue. And notice, whatever is difficult to blue may also be difficult to red. They may be different paths to the same thing, going in opposing directions. But they are just different beings living in the same world.