Music from https://filmmusic.io"Thinking Music" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Show script: (may differ slightly from spoken word)

Last year I completed a literature review on a hypothesis for island biogeography and my assignment was to create two hypothesis and two null hypotheses based on four different variables which we could select from a simulated lab. In case you are not familiar with a hypothesis, it is a prediction based on knowledge you have about a topic. A null hypothesis is similar to the opposite of your hypothesis. For instance, I am lactose intolerant and can’t eat cow’s cheese, but small amounts of goat and sheep’s cheese on rare occasions are not too upsetting on my system. I could hypothesize that if I eat cow’s cheese, then I will get really sick. My null hypothesis might be cow’s cheese and my digestive upset are independent of each other. I know the answer to this and now so do you, but in a scientific experiment, you wouldn’t know the answer until you performed your experiment to test to see if your hypothesis is true. This is called the scientific method and is the gold standard of what is used by scientists to make an experiment and to test each other for validation. If every scientist had a different way of conducting an experiment, then science could not be fluid in replication… and sometimes it isn’t and that’s ok because not being able to replicate means you get to go back to the drawing board to find out what is true and what isn’t. We unknowingly use the scientific method in our lives every day, making predictions about what will happen if I drive another 5 miles on an empty tank of gas or add this much garlic to my dinner. What we don’t do on a regular basis, is test our hypothesis and see if the null holds true. Our minds are very good are creating null hypothesis and formulating our whole experiment even though we have never tested our hypothesis. I think about living out in the woods, off the grid away from everybody and my hypothesis is, “if I do that, then I will be happy and achieve long lasting happiness.” My null hypothesis according to this is, “living off the grid and happiness are independent of each other.” Now my mind and yours like to think about the future happiness that something will bring if we attain it because we tell ourselves that THIS WILL bring that. You say to yourself that you already know that proving your hypothesis will yield these results, that doing this thing in the future will make you feel this way, and your absolute proof is what you conjured up in your mind. There are some people who test their hypothesis, like going off grid for a month on BLM land, or living without electricity and going solar, but they only know the results that this brings by testing it. Would anyone’s level of happiness be the same if one variable changed? Would I be happy off the grid if I used solar and it was December in the snow and couldn’t generate enough electricity? Would you be happy buying the bigger house with that extra she-shed room which amounts to a higher electric bill and more property taxes which means more work to pay for it and less time to enjoy your she-shed? We need to think about our null hypothesis and how variables might be independent of each other and the combination is not like an ionic bond of sodium and chloride which makes salt, instead, two variables might not bring the results you wanted. So, test yourself, perform the scientific method on yourself, re-write your hypothesis, get data, prove yourself wrong or right, and in the end be prepared to share your results for others to replicate. Their data may improve your experiment.

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