Time & Perspective Quote by Ian Hacking

Leave it to Ian Hacking to take an image that screams superstition and use it to diagnose a very modern problem: our hunger to smuggle meaning out of noise. The gag is that haruspicy, done "honestly", starts to resemble something we congratulate ourselves for inventing - randomization. Strip away the incense and you get a crude precursor to the coin flip, the randomized trial, the algorithmic shuffle. Hacking's irony lands because it flatters the scientific instinct (look, even ancient weirdos were reaching for impartiality) while immediately yanking the rug: the medium matters. Chicken guts are not just morally queasy; they're illegible.

That illegibility is the point. A randomized procedure is supposed to prevent interpretation from steering the result. But when the output is messy enough, interpretation rushes back in through the side door. "Flights of fancy or corruption" is Hacking's tight pairing of innocence and malice: sometimes we narrate patterns because it's fun; sometimes because there are incentives to do so. In the lab, that becomes p-hacking, selective reporting, and post hoc storycrafting - practices that let researchers read significance into statistical entrails.

The context is Hacking's lifelong suspicion of tidy epistemologies. He cared about how classifications, instruments, and procedures manufacture the kinds of facts we think we're discovering. Randomization isn't magic; it's a discipline. If the artifacts are too squishy, the priest returns - now wearing a lab coat, holding a spreadsheet, and insisting the data "speaks for itself."