It becomes worthless when we never take the second step. It is worthless because why not just jump straight to step 2? The answer of course is that that would

It becomes worthless when we never take the second step. It is worthless because why not just jump straight to step 2? The answer of course is that that would be expensive and hard and might not prove anything. Much safer and cheaper to NOT actually test you hypothesis and you can still use it to up your publication figure and your funder can still use it to sell hearing aids etc...