The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

by Richard Hamming

Thus rule two: Part of systems engineering design is to prepare for changes so they can be gracefully made and still not degrade the other parts.

Returning to your education, our real problem is not to prepare you for our past, or even the present, but to prepare you for your future. It is for this reason I have stressed the importance of what currently is believed to be the fundamentals of various fields, and have deliberately neglected the current details, which will probably have a short lifetime. I cited earlier the half-life time of engineering details as being 15 years—half of the details you learn now will probably be useless to you in 15 years.

Rule three: The closer you meet specifications, the worse the performance w...

The truth of this is obvious when building a bridge to carry a certain load; the slicker the design to meet the prescribed load, the sooner the collaps...

We both agree a systems engineering job is never done. One reason is that the presence of the solution changes the environment and produces new problems to be met.

A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves. Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with—thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.

Westerman believes, as I do, that while the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes.

A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all.

But let me say again, systems engineering must be built on a solid ground of classical simplification to definite problems with definite solutions. I doubt it can be taught ab initio.

I said it before, but let me say it again: a solution which does not provide greater insight than you had when you began is a poor solution indeed, but it may be all that you can do given the time constraints of the situation. The deeper, long-term understanding of the nature of the problem must be the goal of the systems engineer, whereas the client always wants prompt relief from the symptoms of his current problem. Again, a conflict leading to a meta-systems engineering approach!

29 You get what you measure

You may think the title means that if you measure accurately you will get an accurate measurement, and if not then not, but it refers to a much more subtle thing—the way you choose to measure things controls to a large extent what happens. I repeat the story Eddington told about the fishermen who went fishing with a net. They examined the size of the fish they caught and concluded there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea. The instrument you use clearly affects what you see. The current popular example of this effect is the use of the bottom line of the profit and loss statement every quarter to estimate how well a company is doing, which produces a company interested mainly in short-term profits and which has little regard to long-term profits.

The rating system in its earlier stages may tend to remove exactly those you want at a later stage.

This is not a trivial point; the recruiting of one generation determines the organization’s next generation.

There is also the vicious feature of promotion in most systems. At the higher levels the current members choose the next generation—and they tend strongly to select people like themselves, people with whom they will feel comfortable.

So we train people in war games to use an idealized fleet and not the real one! It is the same in business games; we train the executives to win in the simulated game, and not in the real world. I leave it to you to think about what you will do when you are in charge and want to know the true readiness of your organization. Will random inspections solve everything? No! But they would improve things a bit.

All organizations have this problem. You are now at the lower levels in your organization, and you can see for yourselves how things are reported and how the reports differ from reality—it will still be the same unless you, when you are in charge, change things drastically. The Air Force uses what are supposed to be random inspections, but as a retired Navy captain friend of mine once observed to me, every base commander has a radar and knows what is in the air, and if he is surprised by an inspection team then he must be a fool. But he has less time to prepare than for scheduled inspections, so presumably the inspection reports are closer to reality than when inspections only occur at times known far in advance. Yes, inspections are measurements, and you get what you measure. It is often only a little different in other organizations—the news of a coming measurement (inspection) gets out on the grapevine of gossip, and the receiver, while pretending to be surprised, has often prepared that very morning for it.

“There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix things later.”

30 You and your research

Why do I believe this talk is important? It is important because as far as I know each of you has but one life to lead, and it seems to me it is better to do significant things than to just get along through life to its end. Certainly near the end it is nice to look back at a life of accomplishments rather than a life where you have merely survived and amused yourself. Thus in a real sense I am preaching the messages that (1) it is worth trying to accomplish the goals you set yourself and (2) it is worth setting yourself high goals.

I want to get you to the state where you will say to yourself, “Yes, I would like to do first-class work. If Hamming could, then why not me?”

luck. I have repeatedly cited Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” It both admits there is an element of luck and yet claims to a great extent it is up to you. You prepare yourself to succeed or not, as you choose, from moment to moment by the way you live your life.

If you do not work on important problems, how can you expect to do important work? Yet direct observation and direct questioning of people show most scientists spend most of their time working on things they believe are not important and are not likely to lead to important things.

“Why are you not working on and thinking about the important problems in your area?” If you do not work on important problems, then it is obvious you have little chance of doing important things.

Confidence in yourself, then, is an essential property. Or, if you want to, you can call it “courage.” Shannon had courage. Who else but a man with almost infinite courage would ever think of averaging over all random codes and expect the average code would be good? He knew what he was doing was important and pursued it intensely. Courage, or confidence, is a property to develop in yourself. Look at your successes, and pay less attention to failures than you are usually advised to do in the expression, “Learn from your mistakes.” While playing chess Shannon would often advance his queen boldly into the fray and say, “I ain’t scared of nothing.” I learned to repeat it to myself when stuck, and at times it has enabled me to go on to a success. I deliberately copied a part of the style of a great scientist. The courage to continue is essential, since great research often has long periods with no success and many discouragements.

The desire for excellence is an essential feature for doing great work. Without such a goal you will tend to wander like a drunken sailor. The sailor takes one step in one direction and the next in some independent direction. As a result the steps tend to cancel each other out, and the expected distance from the starting point is proportional to the square root of the number of steps taken. With a vision of excellence, and with the goal of doing significant work, there is a tendency for the steps to go in the same direction and thus go a distance proportional to the number of steps taken, which in a lifetime is a large number indeed. As noted before, Chapter 1, the...

To repeat the point I am making, I changed the problem from just getting answers to the realization I was demonstrating clearly for the first time the superiority of digital computers over the current analog computers, thus making a significant contribution to the science behind the activity of computing answers.

All these stories show that the conditions you tend to want are seldom the best ones for you—the interaction with harsh reality tends to push you into significant discoveries which otherwise you would never have thought about while doing pure research in a vacuum of your private interests.

Now to the matter of drive. Looking around, you can easily observe that great people have a great deal of drive to do things. I had worked with John Tukey for some years before I found he was essentially my age, so I went to our mutual boss and asked him, “How can anyone my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back, grinned, and said, “You would be surprised how much you would know if you had worked as hard as he has for as many years.” There was nothing for me to do but slink out of his office, which I did. I thought ab...

In a sense my boss was saying intellectual investment is like compound interest: the more you do, the more you learn how to do, so the more you can do, etc. I do not know what compound interest rate to assign, but it must be well over 6%—one extra hour per day over a lifetime will much more than double the total ...

But be careful—the race is not to the one who works hardest! You need to work on the right problem at the right time and in the right...

I strongly recommend taking the time, on a regular basis, to ask the larger questions, and not stay immersed in the sea of detail where almost everyone stays almost all of the time. These chapters have regularly stressed the bigger picture, and if you are to be a leader into the future, rather than a follower of others, I am now saying it seems to me to be necessary for you to look at the bigger picture on a regular, frequent basis for many years.

There is another trait of great people I must talk about—and it took me a long time to realize it. Great people can tolerate ambiguity; they can both believe and disbelieve at the same time. You must be able to believe your organization and field of research is the best there is, but also that there is much room for improvement!

Again, you should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it. Do not in the process try to make yourself indispensable; if you do, then you cannot be promoted, because you will be the only one who can do what you are now doing! I have seen a number of times where this clinging to the exclusive rights to the idea has in the long run done much harm to the individual and to the organization. If you are to get recognition then others must use your results, adopt, adapt, extend, and elaborate them, and in the process give you credit for it. I have long held the attitude of telling everyone freely of my ideas, and in my long career I have had only one important idea “stolen” by another person. I have found people are remarkably honest if you are in your turn.

I must come to the topic of “selling” new ideas. You must master three things to do this (Chapter 5): Giving formal presentations, Producing written reports, and Mastering the art of informal presentations as they happen to occur.

Change does not mean progress, but progress requires change.

only when you have developed your abilities will you generally get the freedom to practice your expertise, whatever you choose to make it, including the expertise of “universality,” as I did.

I have already discussed the gentle art of educating your bosses, so I will not go into it again. It is part of the job of those who are going to rise to the top. Along the way you will generally have superiors who are less able than you are, so do not complain, since how else could it be if you are going to end up at the top and they are not?

Finally, I must address the topic of whether the effort required for excellence worth it. I believe it is—the chief gain is in the effort to change yourself, in the struggle with yourself, and it is less in the winning than you might expect. Yes, it is nice to end up where you wanted to be, but the person you are when you get there is far more important. I believe a life in which you do not try to extend yours...

Socrates (469–399 bc) said, The unexamined life is ...