A Introduction
What is a hypothesis good for? What advantages does it offer? Previous chapters concentrated on what the hypothesis is and a few of the contexts in which it appears in science, but I haven't said much about why scientists benefit from using it.
In this chapter, I'll present two major advantages of the hypothesis: first, hypothesis-based studies are more likely to be reproducible than others, and, second, the hypothesis is a powerful tool for organizing and communicating scientific ideas.You might have heard something about the second class of advantages, but almost certainly nothing about the first one, so I want to start with it. We'll pick up where the Chapter 7 left off and see how the hypothesis can improve scientific reproducibility and, especially, how it helps avoid certain problems associated with open-ended, non-hypothesis-based investigations. I'll also outline a statistical method that allows you to assess hypothesis-based work realistically, and I'll explain why many hypothesis-based studies are experimentally reliable. After discussing these quantitative advantages, I'll review the qualitative benefits that the hypothesis offers.
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