Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Nozick

Nozick is taking a scalpel to a very human habit: treating “it worked over there” as if it makes “it’ll fail over here” likelier, then acting surprised when we don’t keep re-running the old exam. The line is deliberately deflationary. He’s pointing out that our testing practices are often driven by economy and attention, not by some tidy Bayesian story where a hypothesis that survives one domain suddenly becomes statistically fragile in the next.

The intent is methodological hygiene. In science and philosophy, once a claim has cleared a certain bar in one “arena” (a set of conditions, measurements, background assumptions), we typically shift to new arenas because we want more information, not because the claim is now “due” to be wrong. Nozick is warning against a gambler’s-fallacy version of skepticism: the idea that passing tests accumulates cosmic debt, so failure is “owed” somewhere else.

The subtext is also about status and intellectual fashion. Repeating the same test can look like pedantry or incompetence; novelty signals progress. That social incentive can be confused for epistemic justification, and Nozick is separating the two: institutional behavior (we move on) isn’t itself evidence about the world (the hypothesis is becoming less likely).

Contextually, this sits inside Nozick’s broader concern with how justification travels. When does support in one setting license confidence in another? He’s insisting we not smuggle a psychological narrative of “eventual falsification” into our logic. Hypotheses don’t get punished for surviving; we just get bored, ambitious, or resource-constrained.