COP 4020 Lecture -*- Outline -*- * Discussion about Paul Graham's essay "Beating the Averages" Q: What was that article about? ** main claim form groups of 2 or 3, and come to some agreement about what the main claim was. You have 5 minutes. Q: What was the main claim made in the article? ** testability ------------------------------------------ SCIENTIFIC HYPOTHESIS Popper: a hypothesis is scientific only if it is falsifiable (Popper) What about: "Algol 60 is the best language that ever has or ever will be invented." "C++ is one of the best languages for writing embedded software." "Static type checking reduces errors by 30%." "Static type checking completely eliminates type errors." ------------------------------------------ Q: How could we state the paper's hypothesis so that it's scientific? ** experiments Q: What kind of experiment could we do to test that?