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“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”
Zora Neale Hurston
Two years of thinking never told me why I struggle to disconnect from electronics by 10pm. One week of experiments did.
Each night I ask myself one question: what’s my limiting factor? For two years the answer was mostly the same. Disconnect by ten. Most nights I missed it. Sitting with the question told me nothing.
I once wrote software for a living. When a program breaks and I can’t reason out the cause, I stop staring at the code. I drop a print statement in, run it again and let the machine show me what I can’t see. So I tried it on myself.
That 10pm rule is an anti-habit: I decided it once so I stop deciding it each night. It kept failing. So a week ago I dropped in a second rule as my print statement: finish work by 6pm, to see what it moved.
The two rules moved together almost perfectly. Each night work ran past six, I stayed on my screens past ten. The experiment found what two years of thinking missed.
I was failing at ten because I was failing at six, with not enough hours left to decompress before bed. The buffer was the thing I lacked.
You cannot reason your way to a hidden cause. The bug hides until you instrument the system.
In 1847, a Vienna doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis watched mothers die of fever on his ward at several times the rate of the ward next door, the one run by midwives. The medicine of the day blamed bad air. Semmelweis read the gap between the two wards instead and found the one thing that set them apart: his doctors came to the delivery room straight from the autopsy table. He made them wash their hands in chlorinated lime. Deaths on his ward fell by nearly ninety percent. The correlation found the cause the theory missed.
Seven years later, cholera was killing Soho in London. The authorities blamed poisonous air. A physician named John Snow plotted each death on a map. The dots clustered around a single water pump on Broad Street. His map found the source that reasoning alone missed.
Even the smartest people still need to run experiments to find the cause. So do you. In 1986, investigating why the Challenger shuttle broke apart, Richard Feynman skipped the argument. On live television he clamped a slice of O-ring rubber, dropped it in a glass of ice water and pulled it out stiff. Cold rubber stays stiff instead of springing back. Thirty seconds of experiment settled what months of memos only circled.
All three settled it by running tests.
Change one thing on purpose. Watch what moves with it.
I found the bug behind my late nights. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a single experiment that cracks every problem yet. But cracking a problem is a function of attempts: run enough experiments and the cause surfaces. Run experiments at a high enough rate and you can engineer success.
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What experiment would answer a question you’ve been stuck on for years?
