
A grant proposal shouldn’t hinge on whether research is driven by a hypothesis - digital55
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20180424a/full/
======
ChuckMcM
The article answers its own question with this bit -- _" Yet grant-writing
experts universally stress that proposals should be built around hypotheses
and warn that those not written this way risk rejection as “fishing
expeditions.”_

"Fishing Expedition" is code for a project that spends a bunch of money and
has no tangible result. Typically that is called wasted money. When you have a
patron that wants you go out and follow your curiosity, where ever it might
lead, that is great. But if you're spending the tax payer's dollar, the folks
who gave it to you have to explain to the congressional budget office _why_
they gave it to you and what they hoped to achieve by giving it to you.

The easiest way to express that value proposition is with a hypothesis
statement. Building equipment that is known to work (like the Hubble) doesn't
require a hypothesis, it requires a credible statement that it will be able to
do something that other equipment cannot. Or that you could not build the same
capability in a different more cost effective way.

~~~
paxy
The problem with that is that when you propose a hypothesis and someone pays
you to prove it, anything other than a positive result is also considered
wasted money. This is the reason why we have all the paid-for junk science out
there today.

~~~
dnautics
Perhaps we should have more of these:

> When you have a patron that wants you go out and follow your curiosity,
> where ever it might lead, that is great.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I think it would be really useful. And if the giving pledge is real, it seems
plausible that a couple of hundred million might be pledged for "pure science"

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zck
When taking science classes in school, I never understood why a hypothesis had
to take a side. It could not be a question, like "hypothesis: does hot water
freeze faster than cold water?", but had to take a position on the issue:
"hypothesis: hot water freezes faster than cold water". I never got why this
was the case; it sets the experiment up for failure: "oh no, I proved my
hypothesis wrong". Who cares? As long as you show something (even not
reflecting the null hypothesis is _something_) with a well-designed
experiment, why does it matter if your guess is right or not?

I'd much rather prove a hypothesis like "a chalk circle drawn around sugar
does nothing to inhibit ants" wrong, than to prove it right! That would be
much more interesting!

~~~
automatoney
I'm not sure what level of schooling you're talking about, but I think there's
two reasons to take a side. First, I think in early school it prepares you to
think in a way that makes sense with null/alternative hypotheses and all of
those z and t stats hypothesis tests. The second reason is to have you think
about what you expect to happen. If you're doing an experiment, you likely
have some information to come up with what you think will happen, and what the
explanation for that is. If you get a result that goes against what your
reasoning was beforehand, then you have a misconception and have to adjust
what you think you know. If you don't take a side, then you could potentially
say that you believed that would happen all along, even if it doesn't make
sense with how you understand things. Taking a side makes you confront your
confusion when it doesn't work out as you thought.

~~~
analog31
>>> If you don't take a side, then you could potentially say that you believed
that would happen all along

How does that harm anything? The result is the result. Pretending to have a
belief so it can potentially be disproven seems contrived.

~~~
automatoney
That part was probably more about using the scientific method in personal
life, I got a bit off track. But to answer you, the idea is that you should
have a belief beforehand, and the experiment is how you test beliefs. The
experiment should be designed to falsify a specific idea. Like say for example
your code doesn't work. You have to have an idea of where it could be broken
in order to test that belief. So you know there's a method with complex
decisions, and it should call foo, but you believe that it isn't. To test this
you throw a print at the top of foo, and see what happens. The belief is
necessary to create the experiment - you won't make efficient progress if you
put print statements after every line. The experiment is designed to
differentiate between "this idea wrong" and "this idea is probably right".

~~~
analog31
I suppose in the case of programming, there should be a belief in what a
function does, because somebody wrote the function in the first place. I'm
thinking about my own work, in areas such as physics and electronics. On one
fine day, I measured the characteristics of about 100 Zener diodes, to inform
a design decision with about 3 or 4 possible outcomes. I don't see where
pinning myself down to a particular opinion of the expected outcome before
making the measurement would have changed the outcome.

------
firasd
I finally 'got' the concept of hypotheses after a couple stupid public policy
experiments here in India. The 'Odd-Even' car rationing experiment in Delhi to
reduce pollution was praised because it reduced traffic. Then the country-wide
demonetization disaster meant to reduce undeclared income was later touted as
a way to enable digital transactions. So to generalize, if you're not clear on
what you're trying to achieve, you can claim success by retrofitting your
results to any stated purpose.

------
SubiculumCode
In neuroimaging research, I often would rather think of myself as a kind of
explorer/cartographer, just weakly mapping the brain in order to fuel future
strong hypothesis testing. That is one reason why I think opening and sharing
our data is so fundamental to the lasting value of our work.

------
cbhl
Scientific funding is actually one of the things I would want to cut to fund a
UBI.

I feel like a lot of "college professor/researcher" work is dealing with the
paperwork of justifying why someone should give you enough money that you can
pay an undergrad or master's student enough money to cover half of tuition so
that you can get them to do some experiments with you.

If people didn't have to worry about rent or putting food on the table, they
wouldn't have to spend time on government paperwork and could just focus on
advancing science instead.

~~~
saagarjha
Are you suggesting that scientific funding doesn’t have benefits for society,
or that it’s benefits are outweighed by the need for UBI?

~~~
bonniemuffin
I think the poster is suggesting that if people didn't have to work for money,
many scientists would continue doing scientific research for free, and they'd
have more time to spend on it because they wouldn't have to play the grants
game.

This might actually be true for a field like math, where you just need
paper/computer to make a major discovery. Probably not for a field like
biology that involves a lot of web lab materials -- paying the humans is only
a tiny sliver of the cost of making a discovery in the biosciences.

------
fizixer
> The success of a grant proposal shouldn’t hinge on whether the research is
> driven by a hypothesis, especially in the physical sciences.

You're looking at it the wrong way. If one call for proposal (meaning
availability to fund only one project) receives a hundred proposals, then the
acceptance rate is going to be 1% no matter what. Requirements like hypothesis
inclusion are just ways to split the weed out work into two phases, e.g.,
eliminate 50 of the 100 proposals because they don't have hypothesis, and then
eliminate 49 out of the remaining 50 after more careful reading. If you don't
have the hypothesis requirement, that only means 99 out of 100 are eliminated
after full reading. And what do you think the likelihood is going to be that
the reviewers would accept your hypothesis-free proposal over dozens others
that have one (all other things considered equal)?

The problem is lack of funding (or alternatively, too many researchers and not
enough research work to go around, depending on how you look at it; Masters
degree is the new Bachelors degree, PhD is the new Masters, etc, etc). What
you're focusing on are marginal issues.

------
pradn
It seems like the idealist model of science - observable data, falsifiable
hypothesis, repeatable experiment - is often not how science works. Aeon has a
good article on this subject.

[https://aeon.co/essays/a-fetish-for-falsification-and-
observ...](https://aeon.co/essays/a-fetish-for-falsification-and-observation-
holds-back-science)

------
forkandwait
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feyerabend/)

------
rococode
Has using a quote from 4 centuries ago to try to prove a point ever worked out
for anyone? It sounds about as effective as "Newton didn't use vaccines, so
why should we?". Perhaps there is some merit to the idea, but talking about
17th century science is probably not the most convincing way to make the
point. That aside, here is Newton's actual quote from Cohen and Whitman's
translation of Principia:

> I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of
> gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not
> deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses,
> whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or
> mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy
> particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards
> rendered general by induction. [1]

To me, this appears to be a very different sentiment. Newton seems to be
saying "I don't try to guess about things I don't understand", not "You don't
need to have a clear plan before doing research". Even if it is true that
Newton never framed a hypothesis in his life (which strikes me as blatantly
false), he didn't live in a world with thousands and thousands of researchers
funded by taxpayer money. When commitees have to decide how to spend money, of
course it's more logical to fund a project with a well-formed question.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotheses_non_fingo)

~~~
mannykannot
A little further into the article, the author presents many other arguments in
support of his point, and discusses why some types of experiment (e.g.,
typical medical investigations) may need hypotheses, while others need not
(the Hubble telescope was not built to investigate a specific hypothesis.)
This article deserves more of a response than one that ignores anything not
mentioned in the title.

~~~
gowld
I'm reminded of research in Computer Science, that generally looks like this:
"In this paper we investigate the hypothesis: Is it possible to build
something cool? First, we briefly summarize cool things that already exist,
then we show how we were able to build something cool, we measure how cool it
is (it's cooler than a bunch of competing things!), and finally conclude with
some cool ideas that we or you might pursue the future."

------
throwawy43018
And then there's the Broad Institute[1]. For some research a hypothesis is too
reductionist. Sometimes you need to catalog at exhaustive scale: sequence the
entire human genome, catalogue the structure of all cell types[5], and their
pathways[6], log all gene expression for every tissue type in as many states
of disease as possible[3], examine repurposing drugs by exposing every type of
cell to every compound in the US Pharmacopoeia to look for novel effects (via
transcriptomics)[2]

Genomic sequencing, microfluidic liquid handling[4,7], and novel statistical
approaches allow for scientific knowledge to be generated at an astounding
pace. After the data exist, then we can make hypotheses. This is the new model
for biomedical big science.

This model of science is often criticized for not being hypothesis-driven,
either as "stamp collecting," or as a force for vacuuming up funding that
would otherwise support myriad small labs. It does bear fruit for
schizophrenia[8], depression [9], as well as diabetes, obesity, and heart
disease [10].

Where are the most interesting, most complex, and most challenging data
problems these days? Not advertising. Not finance. Not crypto. Biology. (And
many from cryptography, math, CS, and physics have switched gears to work on
biological problems.) We run on messy stochastic software, and we finally have
the tools to read the source code and save edits. It's an exciting time.

1\. [https://www.broadinstitute.org/about-
us](https://www.broadinstitute.org/about-us)

2\. [https://clue.io/repurposing](https://clue.io/repurposing)

3\. [https://www.gtexportal.org/home/](https://www.gtexportal.org/home/)

4\. [https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/dronc-seq-
microfluidic-s...](https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/dronc-seq-microfluidic-
single-nucleus-rna-sequencing)

5\. [https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/international-human-
cell...](https://www.broadinstitute.org/news/international-human-cell-atlas-
initiative-gets-underway)

6\. [https://www.broadinstitute.org/klarman-cell-
observatory/appr...](https://www.broadinstitute.org/klarman-cell-
observatory/approach)

7\.
[https://www.broadinstitute.org/files/patents/WO2016149661.pd...](https://www.broadinstitute.org/files/patents/WO2016149661.pdf)

8\.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112379/pdf/ems...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4112379/pdf/emss-59304.pdf)

9\.
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0090-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0090-3)

10\. (Via profile of common author in several fields)
[https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=EISUuucAAAAJ...](https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=EISUuucAAAAJ&view_op=list_works)

------
ajross
It's actually not a terrible article. But argh is the framing in the title
awful.

Fine, fine. Isaac ?!@# Newton can get away with theorizing ab initio and turn
out useful theories. _You can 't_.

More to the point, and relevant to the practice of modern science and not the
Work of Giants: experiments designed without an eye to a clear hypothesis are
pretty much guaranteed to be exercises in p-hacking.

~~~
dang
Ok, let's try the subtitle.

------
sorokod
Newton was looking for the Philosopher's Stone. Why shouldn't we?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton's_occult_studies)

~~~
maxerickson
The fun thing is that modern science has transmuted other elements into gold.

~~~
sorokod
Not quite there with regards to immortality (a property of lapis
philosophorum) though :-)

~~~
danbruc
You probably don't want to become immortal. At first glance it may sound
desirable, but once you start actually thinking about it, you quickly realize
that you were probably pretty naive about that. You may however want to live a
bit longer than what your current life expectation grants you.

