Quotes About Hypothesis

Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate.

In the case of natural languages, the linguists Sapir and Whorf hypothesize a relationship between the expressive power of a language and the ability to think certain thoughts. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that your ability to think a thought depends on knowing words capable of expressing the thought. If you don't know the words, you can't express the thought and

four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that "the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against [the hypothesis].

Echoing a famous argument by the philosopher Karl Popper, most scientists today insist that the dividing line between science and pseudoscience is whether advocates of a hypothesis deliberately search for evidence that could falsify it and accept the hypothesis only if it survives.

The fact that a hypothesis is politically uncomfortable does not mean that it is false, but it does mean that we should consider the evidence very carefully before concluding that it is true.

Any hypothesis that comes out of left field to explain a massive social trend with a single overlooked event will almost certainly turn out to be wrong, even if it has some data supporting it at the time.

It is absolutely essential that one should be neutral and not fall in love with the hypothesis.

Here's a straightforward initial idea: rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws. This is the ethical—even legal—equivalent of Occam's razor, the scientist's conceptual guillotine, which states that the simplest possible hypothesis is preferable.

Now, for that annoying 5 percent of prospects who reject your hypothesis—that it's actually a lack of trust that's holding them back, not some bogus objection—you're going to come at them with everything you've got.

It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

Revised Sherlock Holmes quote) It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth, unless the truth is a hypothesis it didn't occur to you to consider.

But the significance test that scientists use doesn't measure importance.

every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own...

You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10-12 to 1.

That's how the scientists discover new science. They start out with a hypothesis--an idea--and then others believe enough in the idea that they make it true. You see?

The essence of the initial hypothesis is "Figure out the solution to the problem before you start." This seems counterintuitive, yet you do it all the time.

How do you avoid that trap? The McKinsey way is to take an occasional step back from the continual grind of fact gathering and analysis and to ask yourself what you have learned over the past week (or two weeks, or whatever). How does the new information fit into your initial hypothesis? If it doesn't, how might it change that hypothesis? Doing these little reality checks now and then could save you from chasing down blind alleys. As a final

The McKinsey problem-solving process begins with research. Before a team can construct an initial hypothesis, before it can disaggregate a problem into its components and uncover the key drivers, it has to have information.

The moral of this story is that an initial hypothesis is not a prerequisite for successful problem solving. Having one will help organize and forward your thinking, but if you can't come up with one, don't despair. Any McKinsey-ite will tell you that no business problem is immune to the power of fact-based analysis. Put together enough facts, combine them with some creative thinking, and you will come up with a solution.

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis... only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

My hypothesis is that conservative Republicans have very clear values, and when you have that, you're simply more relaxed.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

One must credit an hypothesis with all that has had to be discovered in order to demolish it.

Not as a demonstrated natural law, but as a working hypothesis.