>checking a couple of examples with known outcomes. How do we know the outcomes are known without evidence? For example: > The computer can tell you that titl

>checking a couple of examples with known outcomes. How do we know the outcomes are known without evidence? For example: > The computer can tell you that titles have shrunk (and you hardly need a computer to tell you that: the bulky eighteenth-century title is commonplace and a target of jokes even today Now of course it's a really god hypothesis that book titles have got shorter. I'd bet a lot that it's true. But the way science works is that we take our hunches and make sure that we're not fooling ourselves by checking against actual data. Of course there is a risk of bias by choosing which hypotheses we test - but that's better than just assuming that all our hypotheses are true!