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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: 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.