A few weeks ago, my longstanding friend and colleague Curt Cunning mentioned to me that he was slogging through Nietzsche, which bespeaks his incredible will to power through things that are unpleasant (one of the many things that makes him an exceptional engineer). In any case, it lead me to revisit some of his work (Nietzsche’s, not Curt’s. Curt’s work is the opposite of a slog). My very stale memory of it from college was thinking, “Wow, this dude was on all the drugs.” Which he was, if only because he was perpetually suffering from chronic illness.

Internet culture, and by extension modern popular culture, has developed a very strange relationship with science. There is simultaneously a stronger-than-ever desire for “rational thinking” and consensus-driven mental models, and a virulent, anti-intellectual impatience for things unknown. People want to just have the answers to things they believe that, given the pace of human progress over the last 150 years, we should have.

The myriad public and private school systems in the United States have their flaws, but I distinctly remember learning (well before I studied biostatistics more formally in graduate school) what a null hypothesis was, and the fundamentals of the scientific method. Namely, that an experimental observation can only be used to disprove a prediction, not affirm it. In this sense, science is not concerned with arriving at “the correct” answer. Its goal is to deduce, when given some information, if a hypothesis can be proven false. Scientists evaluating an idea or studying a phenomenon will “walk” themselves to a theory of understanding, produced by either repeatedly failing to prove something wrong, or repeatedly proving things wrong. Or both.