Run an Experiment

Thomas Edison, the most prolific inventor of all time, once extolled the power of experimentation by remarking that:

“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” (1)

The 1% inspiration is the creation of a new hypothesis. The trial after trial and the 99% perspiration is the running of experiments to test and refine the hypothesis, until the problem the inventor is working on is solved. Running experiments, and lots of them, is what Edison began to do in earnest when he opened the world's first invention factory in 1876 in Menlo Park, New Jersey, US, with with the astounding pronouncement that he would “invent some minor thing every ten days and some big thing every six months.”

And he did it. Out of his invention factory came the first practical incandescent light bulb and the entire electric lighting industry, the carbon button telephone microphone which together with Alexander Graham Bell’s work caused the birth of the telephone industry, the phonograph and the recording and music industry, and the first celluloid film strip, camera, and projector, which led to the motion picture industry. By the time he retired, “the wizard of Menlo Park” had accumulated 1,093 patents, more than any other single individual in the world.

Edison ran technical experiments to solve technical problems. But there is another class of experiments that the world will soon be running many of. These are social experiments, which must be run to solve social problems.

Social Experiments

Thwink.org has designed what we hope will be the first of many sustainability social experiments. This is experiment number one, also called The First Experiment. It is designed to do two things: Introduce problem solvers to a whole new way of solving the sustainability problem, and collect data on how well a certain solution element works in pushing on a high leverage point.

A social experiment is an small scale experiment performed using people. It attempts to test a hypothesis about how people will respond when certain stimuli are introduced.

For example, suppose your hypothesis was that training type A is better than type B for teaching people to perform a certain task. The experiment would randomly assign the people in the total group to two smaller groups. One group would receive training type A and the other would receive B. After that both groups would take the same performance test. If those in group A performed significantly better than those in group B, then the hypothesis has been proven true. Otherwise it is false.

How might this apply to the sustainability problem? Environmentalists have thousands of hypotheses for how to solve the problem. Those hypotheses are based on even more analysis assumptions. Simple low cost social experiments can be designed to test all of these conclusions. This would separate the wheat from the chaff very quickly, giving the environmental movement a much more solid foundation upon which to build, and build, and build, until they have erected a body of knowledge that is capable of solving the problem.

The Backlog of Experiments

Someday Thwink.org and other organizations will have a backlog of social experiments that need running, so let's discuss them from that point of view. Each experiment is designed to be relatively easy to run. They are also extremely educational. We have found that groups typically spend more time discussing what they have just done than actually running the experiment.

All you need is to do to run an experiment is choose one, read the material about it, get a group of people together, and run the experiment. You then report the results to Thwink.org, where they will be added to the experimental statistics. Most experiments take a group about 30 minutes to run and another hour or so to discuss and interpret the results.

The group of people could be an after dinner group of friends at home, a larger group of coworkers in a conference room, a classroom of students, and so on. They do not have to be selected perfectly randomly from the populaton for the experiment to be quite useful, because these experiments are testing the effects of new solution elements on people, rather than measuring how they behave under current system conditions. We recommend trying an experiment first on a very small group to smooth out the kinks, and then larger groups. You can also do many small groups instead of a large group.

The purpose of these experiments is to help solve the global environmental sustainability problem. Your help on running them can make a tremendous difference, by helping Thwink.org to gather proof about what is or is not the best way forward.

The experiments test two main types of hypotheses:

1. System Understanding: Are the key assumptions in the analysis correct?
2. Solution Convergence: How does the system respond when this leverage point is pushed on with this solution element?

Once we accumulate enough statistics for an experiment to show whether its hypothesis is probably true or false, we can announce the results on the website. We can also use that new knowledge to design other experiments or hypotheses, to improve the problem analysis, or to improve the solution elements. In addition, some of the experiments will be published.

At the moment we are just starting out with our experiments, so there is only one designed so far. This is experiment 1. It was first run on April 30, 2006. Click on it in the menu, read about it there and on the forum, and see if perhaps you would be interested in running it.

(1) The popular form of this quote is “Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.” However this is not what Edison actually said. It is only a paraphrasing of the full quote. From wikiguote.