Akrasia !

Sometimes a simple word explains so much about humanity. 

Akrasia is a greek word, wiki page: 

Akrasia refers to the phenomenon of acting against one's better judgment—the state in which one intentionally performs an action while simultaneously believing that a different course of action would be better. 

Sometimes translated as "weakness of will" or "incontinence," akrasia describes the paradoxical human experience of knowingly choosing what one judges to be the inferior option.

Where do I even start unpacking this :-) ?  There are so many people who are akratic in some of the fundamental elements of one's life. I mean the core of existence 

Paul's piece about the stupidity of free-soloing, his accident and finally, how he learned from his akratic traits and now - the best part rebuilding his life with cat name Koshka.

for the record, I skipped the akratic segment and went straight to Max :-); man what a decision was that! Thank god, for once my pre-frontal cortex helped me.

Precisely because free soloing is selfish and stupid, it is a controversial topic even amongst climbers. The vast majority of free climbers do not free solo. Some of my closest climbing partners would commit to doing very serious traditional climbing routes, and yet firmly draw the line at soloing. (And trad climbing definitely is serious, as proved by the cripple voice dictating these words.) They told me bluntly that I should never do it, and they didn’t like hearing about it when I had done it. So why did I do it?

There is an ancient Greek term, akrasia. It is sometimes translated as “weakness of will” – although I don’t like that translation, because it already narrows and contorts the field in ways that distort reflection. Nonetheless, akrasia refers to situations in which a person apparently acts against their own professed best judgement. For example, the student who knows that the best thing to do is stay home and prepare for tomorrow’s exam (the outcome of which is crucial to her final grade), and yet who nonetheless goes to the party and gets drunk. She knows and agrees and affirms that the best thing for her to do is to stay home and revise. But she not only does something else, she does it when she herself knows and agrees and affirms that it is a worse thing for her to do. She is akratic. We all are, sometimes.

But the stakes of akrasia are not always the same.

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On the way down, I texted my friend and told him what I had just done. He told me that I was a fucking idiot. I didn’t care. Sometimes you just have to go to the party, even when you know you shouldn’t. And whether you ultimately regret going will depend on more than just the fact that you went. Akrasia is a bird of many feathers.

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But then I try to watch my anger, notice it – and let it slip away. Fair doesn’t come into it. It never did, and it never will. Such anger leads to nothing worth keeping. This week I adopted a cat. I’ve named her Koshka. You rebuild a life, one brick at a time.

 

The Four Pillars of High Agency

 

- Via Here

The Original Position Fallacy!

This is so god-damn important to understand that it should be taught in schools for all grades!

Mathew McAtter has a beautiful explanation: 

This is a simplified example of the Original Position Fallacy in action. A person supports some kind of policy, action, or revolution because they assume they’re either A) in the group that will benefit from it, or B) not in the group that will suffer from it. When used as a literary device, this is often used to compount a character’s suffering with the knowledge that they supported the measure when they thought someone else would be hurt. Indeed, you can think of the Original Position Fallacy as the opposite of the Golden Rule.

You’ve probably seen this fallacy in action among certain communists, neo-reactionaries, and a few libertarians. Many of these often support a massive upheaval to the social order, believing of course that they would inevitably survive (or even thrive) afterwards. Many modern communists forget that in many revolutions, large groups of supporters suddenly found only too late that the revolutionaries considered them in the class of the “bougie” instead of the true “proletariat”.

I’ve personally met many libertarians that believed that if only the government got out of their way, they could finally thrive. Of course, few give thought to any possible negative outcomes of reduced regulation (like Pan-Am, which was famously doomed when the airline industry was deregulated) or possibilities of being crushed by far more ruthless competitors. Many also seem to forget even recent times in their lives that they’ve had to rely on some kind of safety net, and don’t consider what might happen if that net were no longer there.

The Neo-reactionaries are an interesting bunch that desire a return to monarchies and autocracies, away from democracy. Few of them consider that they might end up outside a given autocrat’s favored inner circle, or that technology has not stopped modern monarch’s courts from being snake pits.

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The point I’m trying to make is that even if you only have your own self-interests at heart deep down, you should at least acknowledge that the future is far too uncertain for you to be mentally throwing anyone under the bus. After all, your guarantees that you won’t be under the bus with them are getting shakier by the day.

Well, Pastor Martin Niemöller's poem goes well with original position fallacy and I am literally living to see this happen now. Alas, human nature doesn't change that easy: 

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

And of-course one of my favorite quotes of all time: 

Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come merely from habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of error left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on. … The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

- Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh

Dhurandhar!

If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven.

If you are victorious, the world is yours.

So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.

- Bhagavad Gita 2.37

After a long, long time I have seen a Hindi movie completely engrossed for 3.25 hours!

Amazing casting, immaculate screenplay and complete awareness of every minute details. 

I hope this movie shifts the game of Hindi movies to be more like Malayalam movies. 

This is the first time I watched Aditya Dhar's movie. I need to catch up on his other movies. 

I didn't know the meaning of the Sanskrit word Dhurandhar, so had to look it up.

Dhurandhar means well I got two versions; I like the later version:

• An Expert, master A A top notch person In a specific field.
• A person built to carry unbearable responsibility and still move forward.

Global Water Bankruptcy

Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.

The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.

Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.

- More Here

Via 

What water bankruptcy looks like in real life

In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.

Water bankruptcy has similar stages.

• At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
• Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
• That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.

 

Is A Revolution Brewing In Evolutionary Theory? - Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

This is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Period. 

Full of insights to act on your everyday life (there are tips, it's up-to you to connect the dots). 

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

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Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

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Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

On Satyendra Nath Bose

But Bose’s real story is actually far richer. His life and career reveal a complex, deeply human scientist who navigated intellectual passions and colonial-era challenges to make his historical mark. The narrow focus on his ‘accidental’ discovery overlooks the breadth of Bose’s pursuits and the context that shaped him. Bose was a true polymath, fluent in multiple languages and immersed in literature and philosophy, and a dedicated teacher who believed science should be accessible to everyone, not just an elite few. Crucially, he achieved all this while working under the British Empire, facing the hurdles of a colonised scientist: limited resources, isolation from international peers, and the pressures of life under foreign rule. Acknowledging Bose’s context doesn’t diminish his achievements; instead, it casts them in a more illuminating light. His groundbreaking work was not the result of mythical serendipity alone, but rather the culmination of perseverance, intellect and a willingness to think differently from the heart of a colonial world.

Bose was born on 1 January 1894 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), then the capital of British-ruled India. He was the only, eldest son (among seven children) of a lower-middle-class Bengali family. His father, Surendra Nath Bose, was an accountant with the East Indian Railways who had a knack for mathematics and science. His mother, Amodini Devi, although barely formally educated, managed the large household. Surendra Nath harboured nationalist sympathies; in 1901, he left his secure railway job, a position with the colonial government, to start a small chemical and pharmaceutical venture with a friend. Hence, Surendra Nath’s quiet defiance of colonial structures, and his turn towards Indian scientific enterprise, likely created a family world where a nascent nationalist milieu could thrive. This, I believe, left an enduring mark on his son.

The Bose family belonged to the Bengali Kayastha caste, which was traditionally excluded from the highest echelons of scholarship. By the late 19th century, however, social reforms of the Bengal Renaissance were loosening such barriers and opening up higher education to non-Brahmins. In this milieu of rising opportunities, young Bose demonstrated exceptional talent in mathematics and science, coming top in his classes at university.

Bose launched his academic career just as a new era in physics was dawning, but also during the tumult of the First World War, which cut off direct intellectual contact between British India and the German scientific centres pioneering quantum theory. Bose, however, was determined to keep up with the latest developments. He taught himself German and, with the help of mentors and colleagues, obtained copies of cutting-edge European research. He devoured papers by the physicists Max Planck and Arnold Sommerfeld, and studied advanced texts, such as James Clerk Maxwell’s and J W Gibbs’s treatises on statistical mechanics. Immersing himself in these resources, Bose stayed abreast of the new quantum ideas, even as some Western scientists remained sceptical of concepts such as the light quantum (the photon). Later in life, Bose reflected that working from the ‘periphery’ helped him think independently; the prevailing orthodoxies of the European establishment didn’t bind him.

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By the early 1920s, quantum physics had emerged as a radical new field, offering Bose intellectual freedom from colonial strictures. As I argued in my book The Making of Modern Physics in Colonial India (2020), embracing the quantum provided ‘a great intellectual escape from the hegemony of scientific colonialism’ that defined the British-dominated scientific establishment in India, which focused on teaching classical physics in universities and exploring applied science that benefited colonial interests.

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Notably, Bose was not a traditional firebrand political agitator; he did not lead rallies or write polemics against British rule. His form of nationalism was expressed through intellectual sovereignty. He showed by example that Indians could innovate at the highest levels of physics, even under the constraints of colonial rule. Moreover, by choosing to develop his career in India and by communicating science in an Indian language, he undercut the notion that one must go abroad or use English to be a successful scientist.

Beyond his famous work in quantum statistics, Bose led a rich and varied scientific life. Upon returning to Dacca after his European sojourn, he threw himself into new projects. One of his significant contributions was in the field of X-ray crystallography. With the know-how he gained in de Broglie’s lab in Paris, Bose established one of India’s first X-ray crystallography laboratories at Dacca University in 1926. Under his guidance, the lab’s students and technicians constructed advanced instruments. By the 1930s, they had built a Weissenberg X-ray camera, a sophisticated device for crystal structure analysis, in the department’s workshop. This was cutting-edge equipment for an Indian institution at the time, and it turned Bose’s Dacca lab into a regional hub of research activity. Not only his students used it, but students from other universities (including some from Calcutta) would travel to Dacca to conduct experiments. In an era when Indian scientists often struggled for resources, Bose’s initiative created rare opportunities for hands-on training within his home country.

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True to the label ‘polymath’, Bose’s interests were never confined to physics alone. His lifelong love of literature, music and philosophy complemented his scientific pursuits. Bose was fluent in several languages, including Bengali and English, as well as French, and had a working knowledge of German from his student days. He enjoyed reading the original works of Western philosophers and actively engaged in the cultural and intellectual debates of his time. Friends and colleagues recall that he could discuss the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore or the essays of Bertrand Russell with equal ease, as he could the latest findings in quantum mechanics.

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3 Antidotes To Your Suffering

So simple but yet a profound wisdom from George Saunders. 

I hardly meet anyone who lives by just one of these, leave alone all three.  

• You’re not permanent. 

• You’re not the most important thing. 

• You’re not separate.

And why is this simple wisdom not omnipresent?

In the beginning, there’s a blank mind. Then that mind gets an idea in it, and the trouble begins, because the mind mistakes the idea for the world. Mistaking the idea for the world, the mind formulates a theory and, having formulated a theory, feels inclined to act… Because the idea is always only an approximation of the world, whether that action will be catastrophic or beneficial depends on the distance between the idea and the world. Mass media’s job is to provide this simulacra of the world, upon which we build our ideas. There’s another name for this simulacra-building: storytelling.

 

Living As A Crane!

Wonderful souls doing this rewarding work since 1973!

Thank you! 

The International Crane Foundation was set up in 1973, with the aim of safeguarding the world’s 15 crane species – most are endangered or vulnerable due to habitat loss, climate change and hunting. As senior aviculturist at the headquarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, I’m involved in everything from daily feeding to overseeing chick-rearing.

Whenever possible, chicks are raised by their biological parents or adopted by other adult cranes, but when that isn’t possible, we have to raise them, and teach them how to behave like cranes. Some chicks will later be released into the wild, so it’s important that they learn to stay away from people and other predators.

Young birds identify the first large moving object they see as their parent – a process called “imprinting” – so it’s important they don’t see us as humans while we’re raising them. At one time, feeding was done from behind a barrier to reduce interaction, but this wasn’t really practical.

One day, a colleague threw a sheet over himself. A lot of the staff thought he was crazy, but he started developing a more elaborate costume, adding feathers and even wearing pants that matched the colour of cranes’ legs.

Amazingly, the chicks responded well, and followed him as they would an adult crane. The outfits we use now have detailed puppet crane heads on one arm. The other arm is our “wing”. We did away with the feathers to make laundering the costumes easier. Now, any time we spend among the chicks is done in costume.

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It can be tiring work – my arms get sore. Usually we rotate who’s in the costumes every hour or two. Wearing them provides anonymity, so it’s easy to ham it up.

When I started here in 1986, I learned a small amount of crane vocabulary and could mimic the scolding sound made by adult cranes if chicks were fighting or putting themselves at risk. Now we hide an MP3 player under the costume and play recordings of real adult cranes. The coloration of the puppet heads also matches that of real birds – for example, whooping cranes have a patch of red skin, which they tilt towards other birds to warn if they’re too close. I’ll sometimes do that to get a chick to back off.

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Before they leave us, it’s important that the cranes are good flyers and able to get away from predators. Coaching them can be a challenge but we have a prairie where we encourage them by running and flapping, right up to the point where a real crane would leave the ground. We mimic adults’ “pre-flight” call and stretch out the puppet head. Whenever I see a video of us running and flapping, it does look kind of ridiculous, but the chicks get the idea. It makes me feel like a proud parent to see them take flight.

I do dream about work – sometimes, in my dreams, I would finally be able to fly. In others, my volunteers would take to the sky while I couldn’t, or I’d be the chick at the back of the flock, unable to keep up with the rest, and I would feel very sad.

Currently, 10 of the 15 crane species are still threatened with extinction, though the number of whooping cranes in the world has grown over the past 80 years from the low 20s to over 800. Ultimately, our aim is to help create a self-sustaining population where all the youngsters will be reared by real cranes, so we can get rid of the costumes. Although I would miss my interaction with the chicks, what an amazing outcome that would be.

 

What Is The Question?

Finding the question can be fun, as in thinking of a cartoon caption. But it can also be extremely difficult psychologically. Scientists are often expected by the public to know it all, and yet, “feeling stupid” is a common mode of operation for us. Science is the art of dealing with things we do not know enough about. As Wernher von Braun, the father of German and US rocket programs, phrased it: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Science is humbling in this way. For young scientists, it is often very difficult to understand that it is perfectly normal to not know the answer—or even the question. Learning to embrace this uncertainty is part of our maturation as scientists.

Uri Alon has an intuitive image to describe the process of re-finding our questions. Given what we know about a given topic “A,” a researcher predicts that it should be possible to arrive at point “B,” a scientific destination that seems interesting—a hypothesis. However, the plot inevitably thickens over the course of the research project, and new hurdles force the scientist into a meandering path. Soon, the researcher is lost, having lost sight of the start point (which suddenly seems shaky) and end point (which appears unreachable). Uri calls this “being in the cloud”—you have lost your original question, but the reason why this has occurred is strange and thus potentially exciting and itself worthy of study. From inside the cloud, the situation may seem desperate, but Uri sees the cloud as the hallmark of science: if you are in the cloud, then you might have stumbled upon something non-obvious and interesting. “I’m very confused” a student would tell Uri, to which he would reply, “Oh good - So you’re in the cloud!” Eventually, a new question that arose inside the cloud may lead the way to an unexpected destination “C.”

Embracing uncertainty

The scientific method is often perceived as a simple sequence that leads from a problem to an answer, possibly through long iterations of modified hypotheses. But our reality is much less structured: it often starts with a topic and some observations, leading to the finding of patterns and questions about those patterns, possibly long before we have any explicit hypothesis or any direct tests. And even if a project starts out with a very specific hypothesis, in our experiences, it still generally arrives at a very different point than expected.

In some way, then, night science may be most productive when it has no agenda, when there are no particular questions it is trying to reshape or resolve. When the scientist does not have a hypothesis, she is free to explore, to make connections. In some sense, any kind of expectation on how things are to behave—a hypothesis—is a liability that could obstruct a new idea that awaits our discovery. Once night science elucidates and reframes this question, the researcher can use the full power of day science to solve it. In this sense, a major discovery is typically both the solution and the problem.

Much of basic, curiosity-driven science is exploration, and night science is a fundamental part of that; yet funding bodies often demand that research must be hypothesis-driven. But while some part of night science can be done with the help of an armchair and some good coffee, other parts require the exploration of large and complicated data sets. If no funding is provided for such endeavors, the generation of new questions may be stifled, hindering scientific progress: in science, the problem that is eventually solved is often not the one that was initially sought out.

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