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I'm not sure what level of schooling you're talking about, but I think there's two reasons to take a side. First, I think in early school it prepares you to thi

I'm not sure what level of schooling you're talking about, but I think there's two reasons to take a side. First, I think in early school it prepares you to think in a way that makes sense with null/alternative hypotheses and all of those z and t stats hypothesis tests. The second reason is to have you think about what you expect to happen. If you're doing an experiment, you likely have some information to come up with what you think will happen, and what the explanation for that is. If you get a result that goes against what your reasoning was beforehand, then you have a misconception and have to adjust what you think you know. If you don't take a side, then you could potentially say that you believed that would happen all along, even if it doesn't make sense with how you understand things. Taking a side makes you confront your confusion when it doesn't work out as you thought.

analog31 8y ago
>>> If you don't take a side, then you could potentially say that you believed that would happen all along How does that harm anything? The result is the result. Pretending to have a belief so it can potentially be disproven seems contrived.
- automatoney 8y ago
  That part was probably more about using the scientific method in personal life, I got a bit off track. But to answer you, the idea is that you should have a belief beforehand, and the experiment is how you test beliefs. The experiment should be designed to falsify a specific idea. Like say for example your code doesn't work. You have to have an idea of where it could be broken in order to test that belief. So you know there's a method with complex decisions, and it should call foo, but you believe that it isn't. To test this you throw a print at the top of foo, and see what happens. The belief is necessary to create the experiment - you won't make efficient progress if you put print statements after every line. The experiment is designed to differentiate between "this idea wrong" and "this idea is probably right".
  - analog31 8y ago
    I suppose in the case of programming, there should be a belief in what a function does, because somebody wrote the function in the first place. I'm thinking about my own work, in areas such as physics and electronics. On one fine day, I measured the characteristics of about 100 Zener diodes, to inform a design decision with about 3 or 4 possible outcomes. I don't see where pinning myself down to a particular opinion of the expected outcome before making the measurement would have changed the outcome.

analog31 8y ago

>>> If you don't take a side, then you could potentially say that you believed that would happen all along How does that harm anything? The result is the result. Pretending to have a belief so it can potentially be disproven seems contrived.

automatoney 8y ago
That part was probably more about using the scientific method in personal life, I got a bit off track. But to answer you, the idea is that you should have a belief beforehand, and the experiment is how you test beliefs. The experiment should be designed to falsify a specific idea. Like say for example your code doesn't work. You have to have an idea of where it could be broken in order to test that belief. So you know there's a method with complex decisions, and it should call foo, but you believe that it isn't. To test this you throw a print at the top of foo, and see what happens. The belief is necessary to create the experiment - you won't make efficient progress if you put print statements after every line. The experiment is designed to differentiate between "this idea wrong" and "this idea is probably right".
- analog31 8y ago
  I suppose in the case of programming, there should be a belief in what a function does, because somebody wrote the function in the first place. I'm thinking about my own work, in areas such as physics and electronics. On one fine day, I measured the characteristics of about 100 Zener diodes, to inform a design decision with about 3 or 4 possible outcomes. I don't see where pinning myself down to a particular opinion of the expected outcome before making the measurement would have changed the outcome.