Story so far

A while back I had written this post on Empirical Evidence (EE) explaining the need for EE. The major point being that we as humans are biased. Our belief does not reflect the reality. For example, “Just by going to Netherlands I will get a girlfriend”. These have now been falsified, but they were allowed to stay rent free 2 years ago and maybe it just cost somebody a fortune.

Now What

I have talked so much about EE and greatness and how we can get fooled. I have also talked about in the same essay that first we see our belief, then we make falsifiable predictions and then use EE to falsify the predictions.

Traditionally in a day we have to make several decisions. Such decisions come from our beliefs or evidence. Lets look at some stark examples and how we can gather EE in our day to day lives and where we might be doing it by accident.

EE at work

At work, I constantly have to make decisions, say on the type of material to use, on the type of tolerances I need to come up with and so on while designing. How I do that is by going to people who have done it before, who know for a fact that these tolerances or material types would work for a design and hence satisfy my reality. In this work world, it only now occurs to me how much EE lives here. In normal life we just skip it, say when you pray to god, or think that if you buy new shades you will get girls. Somehow, all the idiots including me, look for evidence while working or doing science i.e, academics but when the stakes are not in regions of importance, we seem to think its okay to do shit. When I say the stakes are not in the regions of importance, I don’t necessarily mean that our decision of what is important and not is right. At work all the woo-woo ain’t gonna fetch you shit, but everywhere else we are not holding ourselves to such strict standards. And the result you ask…

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Peer reviewed papers for example, are some of the highest forms of truth we have. They are so because, they follow the scientific method. The papers propose a hypothesis followed by studies or evidence for the hypothesis/discovery. The paper goes on to say one very important thing. It says that everything they have done can be verified, and that the users are expected to get the same results. They infact enable the reader with all the parameters required to reproduce the evidence. Peer-review implies that top people in the field of the paper written will review the work and give the work more credibility to the quality of your work. So to sum it up, these papers offer us objective, reproducible, peer-reviewed evidence to conclude on the said hypothesis, hence some of the highest forms of truths.

When I want to know the number of calories I need to take in a day, to reduce weight, reliably there are calorie calculators. When I want to know the bending stress of a beam, or when I want to know about what happens to a fluid that is heated statically, there is more than enough evidence to reliably know the reality. But what do you do when the research is yet to be conducted? What do you do when there is no peer-reviewed journal in the field that you are looking for information in?

Experiments is the new EE?

So one way would be to formulate experiments and obtain evidence I guess.s For example, does the 600 hundred word experiment even begin to solve the problem of writing daily and solving problems? or do we have to switch to other methods, what do you do?

It might be tempting to just write a post about it weighing the “pros” and “cons”. But reality is much different than the things that you just came up with as “pros” and “cons”. I need data!

What parameters to take? how to measure? what to measure? This is a whole new ball game that needs to be continued… tomorrow.

Open Q’s

You want to know which mobile is good? You want to know how to sleep early? There is no research or evidence or is there? Experiments; performing experiments. examples