He’s hypothesizing, you know

• Sep 24, 2020 • by Paul Ingraham

Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

I will scatter this meme around PainScience.com, placed under paragraphs that contain an unusual amount of educated guessing:

I think it’s extremely important to minimize speculation in my work, and to clearly identify it when I do indulge in it. I hope this meme will help make it more obvious, because it turns out many readers take my educated guesses very seriously! Often too seriously. Even when I thought I’d been clear that I was speculating or even joking, I get some readers treating my reckons like facts. So I’ve learned: can’t really be too clear about it. With great power…

P.S. My first idea was to use the Mad Max “that’s bait” meme, but it only works as a GIF (I avoid those on PainSci, to keep pages light). In stills, Max’s finger pointing is quite unclear, very low contrast. Morgan Freeman probably 100x more familiar to my readers anyway.