Once upon a time there was a healthy scientific community on Twitter where we discussed science ideas and promoted our research. But alas, this community has broken apart since Twitter became X.
Here are a series of tweets I made in response to a poll by Josh Cashaback about whether we make distinctions between hypotheses and predictions in our papers and grants.
A hypothesis is a mechanism or theory that you are testing. It should be testable in a variety of ways and species. If it depends on your measurements, it is not a hypothesis.
A prediction is how your specific experimental conditions and measurements will play out if the hypothesis is true. I.e when I do x, y will happen.
A prediction alone is not a scientific hypothesis because the same results could be interpreted in different ways in terms of mechanism or theory. The hypothesis tells me WHY you made a particular prediction.
Ideally, when you’re proposing research you want to test your hypothesis in different ways too, this is why we need a body of literature across multiple labs, and not just a single study, to truly test a hypothesis.