I liken this to the experience of playing an old school fighting game in the era before the internet. You would be mashing buttons when suddenly your character would do a power move. Then spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how to reproduce it.
If you could reproduce it, it would usually be intermittent. Eventually you would learn “when I X then my character will Y, but only sometimes.
This is due to the real command being a subset or being a slight variation of what you thought was correct that you accidentally do sometimes.
Even when it’s ephemeral and seemingly random I still find these things valuable. It’s better to be able to reproduce it sometime instead of never. Answering the question “is doing this better than random?” (P95) can help you throw away a bad hypothesis. Most people don’t realize that when they are providing evidence for causality they are competing with random. If they had instead done jumping jacks or said a prayer to the engine gods X times, then the correlation between the wires and the engine might suddenly seem much weaker.
Once you have one hypothesis you can test it against others and I believe that’s powerful. Provided it’s done systemically and with at least a mild understanding of probability and error. Also a hypothesis without a theory first scientific. Why did your friend wrap the wires to begin with?
It’s okay to act in random until we find some effect, but then we also need to take the time to roll back (as you did) to ask “WHY did this happen?” In which case you can begin the process with a fresh hypothesis.
I feel when we are taught the scientific method in elementary school it doesn’t stick for most of us, even engineers. Especially non-engineer folks. It seems at first blush like some truisms strung together, but that simplicity hides very powerful capabilities and subtle edge cases.
If you could reproduce it, it would usually be intermittent. Eventually you would learn “when I X then my character will Y, but only sometimes.
This is due to the real command being a subset or being a slight variation of what you thought was correct that you accidentally do sometimes.
Even when it’s ephemeral and seemingly random I still find these things valuable. It’s better to be able to reproduce it sometime instead of never. Answering the question “is doing this better than random?” (P95) can help you throw away a bad hypothesis. Most people don’t realize that when they are providing evidence for causality they are competing with random. If they had instead done jumping jacks or said a prayer to the engine gods X times, then the correlation between the wires and the engine might suddenly seem much weaker.
Once you have one hypothesis you can test it against others and I believe that’s powerful. Provided it’s done systemically and with at least a mild understanding of probability and error. Also a hypothesis without a theory first scientific. Why did your friend wrap the wires to begin with?
It’s okay to act in random until we find some effect, but then we also need to take the time to roll back (as you did) to ask “WHY did this happen?” In which case you can begin the process with a fresh hypothesis.
I feel when we are taught the scientific method in elementary school it doesn’t stick for most of us, even engineers. Especially non-engineer folks. It seems at first blush like some truisms strung together, but that simplicity hides very powerful capabilities and subtle edge cases.