Jake Thomases: Blissfully Ignorant

Stuart Firestein is a man that knows things. His published papers include "A novel role for jun N-terminal kinase signaling in olfactory sensory neuronal death," "Chromosomal location-dependent nonstochastic onset of odor receptor expression," and several others that similarly roll off the tongue. When it comes to neuroscience especially, it's hard to imagine there are a lot of people who know more things than the chair of the Biological Sciences department at New York's Columbia University.

Firestein recently gave a speech at the Secret Science Club in Brooklyn, which is a very non-secret collection of curious minds (me) and half-drunk hipsters (everybody else) who gathered at a local hall to hear some of the things Firestein knows. But all he wanted to talk about was what he doesn't know, and what everybody else doesn't know.

Along with the olfactory system of salamanders, his favorite topic these days is ignorance. He likes it so much he's written a book on it. Ignorance, he argues, is the motor powering the perpetual motion machine that is science. Science is less about building on facts already in existence than in groping, sometimes half-blindly, for that which remains mysterious. It's like looking for a black cat in a dark room, only sometimes the cat isn't even there. The only thing he likes more than a successful experiment is a failed one, because failure prompts a series of new questions.

Ignorance in Financial IT?

As I listened to him expound on the virtues of having no answers, I couldn't help but wonder how the eminent professor would fare in our world of financial IT. It might be a complete disaster. Goldman Sachs doesn't pay its technologists to administer failed experiments or to revel in the journey while shrugging at the endgame. When Jon Corzine said, "I simply don't know where the money is," Congress didn't stand up and applaud the fact that his answer led to more questions.

Financial firms love answers: LOVE them. They love to know how to trade better, what technology is going to allow that to happen, how much it will cost, and when it will be ready. Cloud, despite its slow adoption by the industry, is considered a goal, a tangible result to strive for. Because of the collective work that cloud providers have done to improve their offering, all I hear now is that startup companies would be foolish not to create all their applications and use services through the cloud, and even that established exchanges will start to move data processing services there. Cloud is cheap, it's fast, and it's getting more secure - a tangible goal.

Or what about collocation technology? At some point, somebody came up with the idea of putting a server next to a matching engine and a new level of very profitable low latency trading was born. Now, says Mayur Kapani, VP of trading technology at IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), exchanges are looking into allowing firms to actually move inside their matching engine for microsecond latency. Yes, it is a continuous quest, and after you go inside the matching engine you'll be able to share the same microchip and eventually connect directly to Duncan Niederauer's brain. But the successful completion of each step is more rewarding than the great unknown.

If there was ever a time when Firestein wouldn't be an outcast, though, it is in the era of Dodd-Frank. There are indeed many more questions than answers these days. What will the rules be? When are we expected to comply? Will these rules look the same six months from now? Dollars are being diverted from core competencies and innovation to possible compliance solutions. And who even knows whether the data repositories necessary today will be the ones necessary tomorrow. Rob Passarella, managing director of institutional markets at Dow Jones, even believes there will be an effort to reinstate Glass-Steagall, which doesn't exactly jive with the business models of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Overconfidence, and the ensuing overcommittment, can be a deadly quality in times of uncertainty; every firm can use a guy that knows that he doesn't know.

The Street and I Are Unconvinced

Personally, I find Firestein's approach depressing. What's the point of any discovery if you can't feel like you're a step closer to some ultimate knowledge, however far away that ultimate knowledge may still be? What's the point of walking toward a house when the house moves five feet away with every step? When my friend and I cornered Firestein after his lecture, he doubled down, insisting that he's perfectly happy to have all of his scientific achievements thrown in the dumpster in 15 years as long as they led to a bunch of other experiments. My friend agreed, delighting in the fact that Ptolemeic astronomy crumbled in the face of Copernican astronomy.

I don't get it. Give me goals any day. Give me step-by-step methodology. Let me know that the platform I just built will inspire future platforms. Ignorance may be wonderful for academia; I'm not sure it could get a job at Goldman Sachs.