I've never felt more stupid than these days after I started doing my PhD. Some one asks questions about my work and I don't know the answer or I have all this data that just don't make sense and I don't know why. When something goes wrong most of the time I don't know why - I even don't know when it goes right!
Well I'm glad to know I'm not alone and this feeling of stupidity is not necessary a bad thing. Came across this article recently The importance of stupidity in scientific research from here. The last paragraph puts things in perspective:
"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."
