"What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead"
About this Quote
Wiener is poking a finger at science’s most comfortable self-deception: the belief that “results” are where the drama lives. In practice, the real power sits upstream, in what researchers quietly assume before they touch a dial or run a model. Those assumptions decide what counts as a signal, what gets treated as noise, which variables even qualify as “real,” and what kinds of answers are allowed to appear. By calling that pre-experimental baggage “infinitely more interesting,” Wiener isn’t dismissing empirical work; he’s exposing the hidden architecture that makes empirical work legible.
The line lands because it flips the prestige economy of research. We reward publishable outcomes, but Wiener points to the deeper intellectual gamble: the choice of framing. Experiments don’t simply test nature; they test a question that has already been narrowed by language, measurement tools, institutional habits, and the experimenter’s metaphysics. That’s why the subtext feels almost mischievous. He’s reminding fellow scientists that they’re not neutral observers; they’re authors, editing reality into a format their apparatus can read.
Context matters: Wiener helped found cybernetics, a field obsessed with feedback, control, and communication across machines, animals, and societies. In that world, “assumptions” aren’t philosophical afterthoughts; they are the system’s input parameters. Get them wrong and your neat outputs become elaborate confirmations of your own blind spots. The quote is a warning and a dare: interrogate the default settings, because the experiment will happily reward you with results that merely prove you believed them first.
The line lands because it flips the prestige economy of research. We reward publishable outcomes, but Wiener points to the deeper intellectual gamble: the choice of framing. Experiments don’t simply test nature; they test a question that has already been narrowed by language, measurement tools, institutional habits, and the experimenter’s metaphysics. That’s why the subtext feels almost mischievous. He’s reminding fellow scientists that they’re not neutral observers; they’re authors, editing reality into a format their apparatus can read.
Context matters: Wiener helped found cybernetics, a field obsessed with feedback, control, and communication across machines, animals, and societies. In that world, “assumptions” aren’t philosophical afterthoughts; they are the system’s input parameters. Get them wrong and your neat outputs become elaborate confirmations of your own blind spots. The quote is a warning and a dare: interrogate the default settings, because the experiment will happily reward you with results that merely prove you believed them first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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