I'm glad that article is out there-- it would have helped me get through one of my midterms this past semester! The problem in question went something along the lines of "Explain this data given our syntactic theories." Some of the data did not fit the theories. Absolutely would not fit, no matter what I did. I felt like a total moron. It drove me nuts. There must be a way to make this work, I'm just not seeing it-- right? When time ran out, I wrote up what I'd tried and why it didn't work, and submitted it.

When the professor went over the problem later in class, he said that nobody, not even the person who'd published this data, had an explanation. The point of the question was just for us to learn when to stop work on a problem and write up what we had, because, as future researchers, these are the sorts of problems we'll face out in the real world. You have to at least let the rest of the scholarly community know what didn't work, so people can try other things and the field can make progress. (Still, by that point we were furious. We wanted to know the answer really, really badly!)

I now try to work in areas that push me outside my comfort zone, that really do make me feel stupid-- so that I understand that the feeling of stupidity I get doesn't really mean I'm stupid (which would mean I'd be so discouraged I'd quit), just that I haven't practiced something to the point where it feels like second nature, or that it's such a hard problem that nobody knows the answer.