Itai Yanai
The revolution comes to science when we finally dethrone the hypothesis-driven mode as the only respectable form of scientific inquiry for grant and thesis proposals.
Dec 16, 2022 at 1:47amWeb
Show threadIddo Friedberg πŸ’”πŸŽ—π€…β€Žπ€‰π€ƒβ€Žβ€Žπ€Dec 16, 2022

@itaiyanai The annoying thing about hypothesis-driven advocacy is that everyone, including the advocates, goes on fishing expeditions. Can be long ones

How would you articulate a new hypothesis without having gone on some exploratory endeavor no one else went on before you?

Until you don't bring the "unknown unknowns" into the "known unknowns" you wouldn't be able to know what you didn't know, and claim that now you can make it known.

(Apologies to Donald Rumsfeld & Sir Humphrey Appleby)

Show threadPeter SarkiesDec 17, 2022
@iddux @itaiyanai Even a fishing expedition is implicitly hypothesis-driven. You decide and plan where to look for something new. The hypothesis is that you will find something even if you don't know what that might be.
Show threadGabriele PollaraDec 18, 2022

That's exactly it @PSarkies. To me that's the statement that unifies the two models of being of hypothesis free or hypothesis driven

@iddux @itaiyanai

Show threadPietroGhezzi Dec 16, 2022
@itaiyanai frankly, I never understood it. We were all pretending we did.
Show threadJohannesDec 16, 2022
@itaiyanai
We all embark into research with assumptions and I find hypotheses a helpful framework to define those. What corrupts this process are the incentives in academia, favouring fairytales where the good hypothesis proves correct, where the selectively collected data happens to have no function besides backdrop to our hero’s journey and where we have already slain the dragon before we even left the castle.
Show threadHaley Sanderson Dec 18, 2022
@itaiyanai yup, I've had great papers come out of exploratory research and I've had to fight pretentious "hypothesis-driven" co-authors NOT reviewers all the way to publication.
Show threadCarolyn KingDec 18, 2022
@itaiyanai agree with how you phrased it as "dethrone" and "the only". we recently had a hypothesis and did some experiments to prove it wrong - spent a lot of money!! .. and ultimately weren't able to. but there was something hidden in the sequencing data that we later discovered only by sheer accident (a bit embarrassing). this is the question that's hammering me these days - how do you find something you don't you're looking for? clearly there *is* a way