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Karl Popper came up with the idea in the 1930's that scientists should attempt to falsify their hypotheses rather than to verify them. The basic reasoning is that while you cannot prove a hypothesis to be true by finding a number of different confirming instances (though confirming instances do make you more confident in the truth), you can prove a hypothesis to be false by finding one valid counter-example.
Now Orin Thomas writes at WindowsITPro that you’ve probably diagnosed hundreds, if not thousands, of technical problems in your career and Popper's insights can serve as a valuable guide to avoid a couple of hours chasing solutions that turn out to be an incorrect answer. According to Thomas when troubleshooting a technical problem many of us “race ahead” and use our intuition to reach a hypothesis as to a possible cause before we’ve had time to assess the available body of evidence. "When we use our intuition to solve a problem, we look for things that confirm the conclusion. If we find something that confirms that conclusion, we become even more certain of that conclusion. Most people also unconsciously ignore obvious data that would disprove their incorrect hypothesis because the first reaction to a conclusion reached at through intuition is to try and confirm it rather than refute it."
Thomas says that the idea behind using a falsificationist method is to treat your initial conclusions about a complex troubleshooting problem as untrustworthy and rather than look for something to confirm what you think might have happened, try to figure out what evidence would disprove that conclusion. "Trying to disprove your conclusions may not give you the correct answer right away, but at least you won’t spend a couple of hours chasing what turns out to be an incorrect answer."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @07:25PM
When we use our intuition to solve a problem, we look for things that confirm the conclusion.
No that's called being an incompetent troubleshooter. The really good ones use their intuition to find the best spot to start, unconscious parallel processed adsorption of as much raw data as they can get, and then unleash the Popper or however you want to phrase it at that experience based starting point. Which used to just be called experienced problem isolation or finding and testing at a demarcation point or any number of other ways to put it. If doing whats always worked while re-naming it "Popper style testing" works, well, thats cool even if its not new. Save the blind panic and thrashing assumptions around randomly for when "real troubleshooting" doesn't work.
A question: Is reading Popper worth the time? I have not, and in my infinite spare time I could make time if convinced its worth it. Or a more concrete way to phrase the question: someone here, who read some Popper, what, and when you were done did you feel it was worth the time or did you regret the time invested? The problem with a dude who was heavily influential half a century ago is what might have been controversial or thought provoking half a century ago, to a fish who grew up in that water, is going to be "duh" and not be very thought provoking, therefore not worth the time.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday May 25 2015, @09:48PM
This is what I came here to say. Maybe the first year or two I used intuition to guess where the problem was, but any competent debugger quickly learns to gather data, think about it, possibly gather more data, then find and fix the problem.
CSB. In the 80's a couple co-workers and I were meeting for drinks. I got there first and grabbed a 4 person table. Some dude I didn't know asked if he could sit there, as I only expected 2 others and no other tables were available I said "sure!". My other 2 buds arrive and, soon enough, we start talking about work. We had a nasty problem, knew what it was, and had no idea how to fix it. The dude asked "you've got the source code, don't you?". Yeah, we actually wrote the source code. "Well, why don't you fix it with the editor!".
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Monday May 25 2015, @10:52PM
A question: Is reading Popper worth the time?
Probably not. The issue Popper was dealing with was the nature of verification in science. Application to troubleshooting is a kind of limited case, usually with a much smaller range of possibilities where the process of elimination makes sense. And worse, once you fix the problem you don't really care whether the fix was in fact what fixed the problem (so long as it stays fixed).
Popper clarifies the logical validity of the Hypothetico-deductive method of science. We start out with a problem, form a hypothesis (possible explanation), and then devise an experimental test of the hypothesis. The "intuition" people are speaking of here belongs to the "knack" for forming reasonable hypotheses, what Charles Sanders Peirce called "abductive" reasoning. Not part of Popper's Falsificationism, but it does relate to the real problem.
The issue is inferences based on conditional (hypothetical) statements. If the hypothesis is correct, we necessarily get these particular results. Probably through in a certerus paribus here, because another factor is experimental design that rules out things like contamination, etc. So, we run the experiment, get the predicted results, WooHoo! Our hypothesis is true! This is where Popper says, not so fast. If the hypothesis is correct, then you must get the deduced results. But that does not mean you can go the other way, that is you get the results that means the hypothesis is true. Technically, this is the formal fallacy of affirming the consequent in symbolic logic.
On the contrary, however, there is the other valid form of reasoning with hypotheticals, and this is the one used in troubleshooting. You from a hypothesis, as above, deduce a test, if the test fails, your hypothesis is wrong, necessarily. Car analogy! Car won't start, I intuit the hypothesis of a back coil. If the coil is bad, spark plugs would have no spark. Take out one plug, crank and observe. Good spark. Therefore, coil is not the problem. This is the logical form modus tollens. So in the philosophy of science, Popper's position is that theories (hypotheses writ large) can only be definitively disproven.
This is related to Quine's "underdetermination thesis", which is basically saying that for any particular experimental result, there are always more than one potential hypothesis that could be correct, and positive results do not tell us which one! This is why scientists can have very different theories considered to be true at any one point in history, and leads to Thomas Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts: old theories never are disproven, just sooner or later all their adherents pass away. So, see where confirmation bias is in all of this?
Take away: theories are never deductively proven, only disproven. But that doesn't mean we can believe whatever we like. Theories are inductively proven, which means never conclusively, but the more experimental designs we have that give positive results for a theory, the more repetitions of experiments to rule out flukes, and the more competing theories are disproved, the more likely the last theory standing is true. Nice thing about troubleshooting is we reach an end state where either the problem is solved and we don't really care why (it's like medicine!) or we junk the whole thing and start over. In science, we can't say in advance what a "fix" would be.
Sorry to go on so long, hope this answers your question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2015, @09:58AM
Really? I definitely have a bad feeling if something works and I don't know why. It can of course be reasonable to apply a fix you don't really understand, just because it is more important to get the problem fixed now. But that's not the same as not caring; it means simply to prioritize.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2015, @12:15PM
Niave Popper doesn't really work. The reason is that you can't test a theory in isolation, there are always auxiliary assumptions being made (like properly functioning equipment).
The logic goes
(T AND A) implies O
where,
T=Theory; A=Assumptions; O=Observation
With falsification you do not see the expected observation (~O)
~O Therefore ~T OR ~A
See the problem?
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~pemeehl/147AppraisingAmending.pdf [umn.edu]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:36AM
I would take your critique more seriously if you spelled naïve correctly. But yes, your critique does got to Quine's position, that one can alway adjust assumptions to take into account experimental refutations. Of course, where does that leave us? Republicans could be correct? The horror! The Horror! (cf. Joseph Conrad, _The Heart of Darkness_, or, just watch "Apocalypse Now".
(Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Saturday May 30 2015, @11:52PM
You're both wrong :)
Doing so (Quine etc.) would make it an ad hoc hypothesis and thus fail the falsifiability requirement i.e. it is no longer possible to falsify the hypothesis when you make an exception to explain the “validity” of it i.e. it has all been reduced to a tautology.
If that has been done “well enough” and the tautology is byzantine enough it will be published or taken as “true” or make a career even though it is anti-scientific ritualistic cargo cult “science”.
More Popper = more science.
Cudos for mentioning Conrad though, it's a good book, and it's hard not to drag that movie into it even though it's set on another continent and has a different story and is only ever so slightly related (more inspired than derived).
Bite harder Ouroboros, bite! tails.boum.org/ linux USB CD secure desktop IRC *crypt tor (not endorsements (XKeyScore))