No one believes an hypothesis except its originator but everyone believes an experiment except the experimenter. Most people are ready to believe something based on experiment but the experimenter knows the many little things that could have gone wrong in the experiment. For this reason the discoverer of a new fact seldom feels quite so confident of it as others do. On the other hand other people are usually critical of an hypothesis, whereas the originator identifies himself with it and is liable to become devoted to it.
The technology for those tests comes from experiments, and if you collared the developers (not the marketers), you'd get some insight into the limits of knowledge, limits that reporters rarely recognize. Those of us who don't do or actively use research might be surprised.
I remember hearing an engineer's slogan to the effect that "Every bridge will fail eventually, but I pray mine doesn't fall down yet." It turns out that in the non-virtual world, even things as simple as identical I-beams aren't exactly the same.
(And, thanks to my usual rabbit-tracking, remember The Wonderful One-Host-Shay)? "Logic is logic."
1 comment:
I had not seen this put so cleanly before. It makes eminent sense
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