Attitude, hypothesis, experiment, and evidence

Doing science is fundamentally a state of mind more than any particular set of tools or any particular domain of knowledge.

How do you know when you’re doing science wrong?

Easy:

Science.jpg

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More in the same vein from xkcd.

Fostering these attitudes is increasingly relevant in organizational settings. We’re awash in data and in advocates of data mining, information analytics, super crunching, and other forms of extracting insight from the data. Too often, however, the emphasis elevates a new set of experts with a new set of mysterious tools saying “trust me.” Trusting them is no better than trusting your gut or someone else’s gut.

Fundamentally, the scientific method is no more than a method for how to be productively skeptical in the face of pressures and dispositions to believe and the multiple ways to be mistaken.