Behind the Philosophy of Science

This article was originally written for Sex Sponsors.

We all bring our particular views, biases, and general outlook on life, our "philosophy", to the way we run our business. We may either prefer to work alone or to have a partner or employees. We may keep a heavy cash reserve for our company or keep everything heavily reinvested. We might choose to place particular emphasis on marketing, sales, traffic, networking, or any of a myriad of other business areas. As we go through our lives, we alter our business strategies both as a result of our past business successes and failures and of changes in our personal philosophies.

My own background is a scientific one. I have a BS in Physics and my approach to the way I conduct business is decidedly scientific in nature. What I'm going to discuss here is the philosophy of the scientific method and how to apply it to your business. Now I'm not going to tell you that I believe this is the best way to conduct business. As a matter of fact, I believe that there ARE better models for achieving business success. In this business, one should probably be more aware of the principles of graphics layout, networking, marketing theory, and corporate structure than those of the scientific method. However, what I am going to describe here is a particular viewpoint, one that can be incorporated into your mental view of how your success will be achieved.

You probably remember being taught an outline of something like the following as the Scientific Method.

1. Observation of phenomenon or phenomena.
2. Developing an hypothesis
3. Making predictions from that hypothesis.
4. Developing experiments to confirm or deny the predictions.

What defines the scientific method and makes it so powerful is the ability to make testable predictions. One of the most famous examples of making a prediction from scientific work was made by Albert Einstein. According to his General Theory of Relativity published in 1915, light doesn't travel in the straight lines that one would assume, but instead bends near massive objects. During a solar eclipse in May of 1919, British astronomers observed a star at the edge of the sun when in reality the star was "behind" the sun. Light HAD bent around the massive Sun and the star appeared to be where Eistein's theory predicted it would. In November of 1919, the London Times published an article saying that Einstein's theory has overthrown Newton's theory of gravitation. Immediately Einstein was world famous. How powerful a prediction can be!

While I stated earlier that there are more important models to business success than that of the scientific method, in some way we can't avoid using scientific methodology. We're more likely to think of what we're doing as "trial and error" than as serious scientific methodology. A first initial try at something yields a partial success, the error is noted, we adjust our assumptions, and we try again. Without being aware if it, we're using scientific methodology in our daily and business lives.

We can make a powerful leap from here to there though. We can go from the informal "trial and error" to the more formal idea of constructing testable predictions. Furthermore, we can make sure that these predictions are capable of falsifying the theory. The idea is this. You first make a hypotheses and then make a series of logical predictions based upon your original hypotheses. The predictions must be capable of proving your theory wrong otherwise you are wasting your time formulating them. The modern view of science is that a good theory has this falsifiability feature. The philosopher Karl Popper stated these 7 reasons as to why falsifiability is so important in a 1963 paper originally published in "Conjectures and Refutations."

"1.It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory - if we look for confirmations.

2.Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory - an event which would have refuted the theory.

3.Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.

4.A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.

5.Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.

6.Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of "corroborating evidence.")

7.Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers - for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a "conventionalist twist" or a "conventionalist stratagem.")

In making the leap to this formal idea of modern scientific methodology one can have a much more accurate view of what is going on. In practice, it might work something like this.

Say that you have a new idea as to something that will increase your sign up ratios. You redesign your website with this idea in mind and your signup ratios increase. According to the way we are typically taught to view these things, your idea has succeeded. But according to the scientific model, we haven't done anything to FALSIFY this new idea of ours. In other words, you may have just been lucky. If you think about some of the crazy things that happen with your websites you'll realize that this is happening.

Here is an experience of mine and I'm sure you'll think of your own. I had what I thought was a great new idea to increase the traffic flow on one of my sites (a TGP). And this I believed, was a general idea about traffic flow, one that I believed would work on any TGP. I try the idea and BOOM! Traffic doubled overnight. I got all excited and tried the same thing on a few of my other sites, but, then something unexpected happened. The traffic on one of the sites stayed just where it was and the other site actually lost traffic. This will drive you MAD! What is going on? I can only come to the conclusion that my original hypotheses was wrong! But why did site traffic increase? I don't know! Maybe it was a change that I inadvertantly made while making the first one (this happens all the time to me). Maybe it was just a freakish sort of combination of factors on this one website. I don't know and it can take a long time to actually figure it out. But the thing is, you HAVE to figure it out because if you can, you have found a way to dramatically increase your traffic on all your websites.

All that happened in that particular case, I believe, is that I lucked out. At most, I may have found a very special case but to this day I'm not even sure why it worked. I certainly haven't found a general rule. Now of course I feel very excited and I've increased my traffic and I'm willing to celebrate that. A lot of work is still in front of me though. I need to figure out just what the hell happened!

Now where the scientific method paid dividends for me is when I tested my idea on a second and third website. My prediction was that if my idea was correct, site traffic would increase on these two sites also. If it didn't, then my original idea, the hypotheses, was incorrect. It turned out that I was wrong. Something worked. But I still don't know what. What I don't do is get caught up on my one success and think that I actually did something. I got lucky. When I figure out the "hows and whys", then I can correctly feel that *I* did something. I am still looking.

I think that if one keeps in mind the idea of creating falsifiable hypotheses and of making and honestly evaluating predictions, one can gain a powerful new tool for handling and evaluating one's day to day work. I also think that Popper's seven ideas regarding hypotheses formulating and testing can be very enlightening and that it is the worth the time to read them a few times. His 1934 book "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" is considered to be one of the greatest books of the twentieth century and you will find much more on this subject there. You can also find some excellent articles by Popper on this subject on the web.

I leave you with a Popper quote: "An idea is bold or daring if and only if it takes a great risk of being false."