Sendhil Mullainathan Quotes

… scientists are required to back up their claims not with private feelings but with publicly checkable evidence. Their experiments must have rigorous controls to eliminate spurious effects.

Every theory presented as a scientific concept is just that; it's a theory that tries to explain more about the world than previous theories have done. It is open to being challenged and to being proven incorrect.

Science has authority, not because of white coats, or titles, but because of precision and transparency: you explain your theory, set out your evidence, and reference the studies that support your case.

The scientific method actually correctly uses the most direct evidence as the most reliable, because that's the way you are least likely to get led astray into dead ends and to misunderstand your data.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Only by observing this condition would the results of our work be regarded as fully conclusive and as having elucidated the normal course of the phenomena.

In my grandfather's lab, scientists did independent research, and peers reviewed and commented on its merits. Politics, he taught me, had no place in the scientific process.

Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.

Truth in science can be defined as the working hypothesis best suited to open the way to the next better one.

When you start using test audiences, it becomes more scientific than it is about the work itself, and that's boring.

There can be theory but, you know, the problem is you've got to be able to test it. So theories are one thing, testing is another.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Most physicists like myself won't believe the result until every possible caveat has been investigated and/or the result is confirmed elsewhere.

I love science. I hate supposition, superstition, exaggeration and falsified data. Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions - and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

Measurements, observations, descriptions can only be considered scientific when they are independently confirmed by other people.

Now it is established in the sciences that no knowledge is acquired save through the study of its causes and beginnings, if it has had causes and beginnings; nor completed except by knowledge of its accidents and accompanying essentials.

Moreover, in the experimental sciences, the scientific fraternity must test a new theory to destruction, if possible.

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.

The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.

Theorists have wonderful ideas which take years and years to be verified.