There’s long been evi­dence that human brains have spe­cific struc­tures for per­ceiv­ing, rec­og­niz­ing, and play­ing music, and even that peo­ple with “greater” abil­i­ties in these struc­tures also have “greater” abil­i­ties in math­e­mat­ics. If I remem­ber cor­rectly, we know this because cer­tain peo­ple suf­fer from musico­genic epilepsy, expe­ri­enc­ing vary­ing degrees of epilep­tic seizures when lis­ten­ing to par­tic­u­lar songs.

It’s not par­tic­u­larly sur­pris­ing that are brains are spe­cial­ized at this; our brains are spe­cial­ized at a lot of other things that are impor­tant to peo­ple. But from an evo­lu­tion­ary per­spec­tive, why was music impor­tant for our sur­vival? Specif­i­cally, why were peo­ple bet­ter able to process rhythm, rhyme, tim­bre and tone bet­ter able to sur­vive? Per­haps these peo­ple were able to draw the atten­tion of their peers, like a prim­i­tive form of fame, and this opened up other avenues for acquir­ing food and shel­ter. Or maybe they were bet­ter able to per­ceive the social mean­ing (and impend­ing dan­ger) of a com­pet­ing tribes beats.

But where did all of this music come from? Pre­sum­ably peo­ple needed to be able to per­ceive music before being able to play it. Or maybe the foun­da­tions of music per­cep­tion, such as rhythm, were boot­strapped by other pat­tern match­ing per­cep­tual sys­tems, enabling peo­ple to mimic the rhythms with prac­tice. I can see it now: the early homo sapien sit­ting at the edge of her cave entrance on a rock, wait­ing for the return of the hunt­ing party. It’s pour­ing out­side, and a lively pat­tern of drips drop down from the arch of the entrance, emerg­ing from the orderly chaos of sur­face ten­sion and grav­ity. Lis­ten­ing to this rhythm all after­noon, and hear­ing the pat­tern slow as the skies dried, that boar tooth in her hand must have become her mal­let and the rock her marimba. I won­der what the hunt­ing party thought when they returned home and she was teach­ing the kids how to tap stone. At least the kids were busy play­ing instead of whin­ing about the lack of food.

What is an idea? Is it some­thing that com­pels one to act? Is it influ­ence? Is it the atom of com­mu­ni­ca­tion? I would like to think that in each of these sen­tences is an idea, some pat­tern of thought that I can con­vey with lan­guage. If this is the case, what is this sequence of sen­tences? Is it a means of mak­ing you think what I’m think­ing? By tran­scrib­ing these words, am I guid­ing your thought? And what enables this guid­ance? Must I trans­late these ideas to writ­ten word to steer your mind, or might I speak them for the same effect? Might I sketch them out with lines and arcs with a char­coal pen­cil and in doing so ask you these same ques­tions? What is it I’m doing? How is it that by form­ing this prose I influ­ence the actions of your mind? How is it that I trans­mit this pat­tern of thought from my mind to yours? Do we share the same mech­a­nisms, the same struc­tures in our brains? Does some con­ven­tional human phys­i­ol­ogy give idea life? What if your mind had a dif­fer­ent archi­tec­ture that mine? Would you be unable to con­ceive of the ideas I present here? Is this para­graph a pro­gram that you exe­cute by read­ing and whose effect is to mod­ify your men­tal state? And is its power not in its deter­min­ism, but in the impre­cise pre­dictabil­ity of your inter­pre­ta­tion of it? Per­haps the vari­abil­ity in my read­ers’ under­stand­ing of these con­cepts serve as the muta­tive oper­a­tor of their evo­lu­tion. Per­haps if ideas live and die like organic forms, bias is the racism of their soci­ety, and objec­tiv­ity their democ­racy. Let these ideas thrive; give them time to breathe. Con­sider for a moment your role in their sur­vival and adap­ta­tion. Think.

As orig­i­nally con­ceived, empiri­cism was a way to test your the­o­ries and hypothe­ses against obser­va­tions of the nat­ural world. This approach to under­stand­ing real­ity was a rev­o­lu­tion in the sci­ences, bring­ing a flood of sci­en­tific knowl­edge and tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments.
It’s not sur­pris­ing then that in mod­ern applied sci­ences, such as human-computer inter­ac­tion and soft­ware engi­neer­ing, empiri­cism plays a sim­i­lar role in help­ing researchers under­stand the phe­nom­ena they work with. One major dif­fer­ence between “soft” sci­ences such as HCI and soft­ware engi­neer­ing and “hard” sci­ences such as biol­ogy, chem­istry, and physics, is that the phe­nom­ena they study are quite dif­fer­ent in their per­ma­nence. Physi­cists study the inner work­ings of the laws of the uni­verse; biol­o­gists study the form and func­tion of processes in life. These are phe­nom­ena that change very slowly over time, which gives “hard” sci­en­tists time to hypoth­e­size, the­o­rize, reject, and synthesize.

In con­trast, “soft” sci­ences study phe­nom­ena that are extremely quick to change, rel­a­tive to the expan­sion of the uni­verse and evo­lu­tion on Earth. I might sug­gest some rela­tion­ships between pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ment design and group work, only to have yet undis­cov­ered and fun­da­men­tal dimen­sions of these pro­gram­ming envi­ron­ments change under my nose. I might pro­pose a the­ory about the causal rela­tion­ships between pro­gram­ming par­a­digms and pro­duc­tiv­ity, but in 20 years, some­one could rein­vent the pro­gram­ming lan­guage, pos­si­bly mak­ing my the­o­ries irrel­e­vant. Worse yet, by rely­ing on empir­i­cal data, which is extremely fickle and context-sensitive, I may not even con­firm my hypothe­ses or the­o­ries before they have to be thrown out.

What’s the value of empiri­cism then, if it’s not fast enough to keep up with the pace of tech­no­log­i­cal change? One argu­ment might be that the objec­tiv­ity that empiri­cism pro­vides has a slight edge on our best intu­itions, even in the short term. If I’m try­ing to decide what to name a par­tic­u­lar field on a web form, am I bet­ter off with my per­sonal biases, or small sam­ple of data, how­ever small or skewed? Prob­a­bly with data. At least then, the design choice is defensible.

But I think there’s a bet­ter rea­son. What under­lies these trade­offs is the fact that many “soft” sci­ences are used more directly for design than the harder sci­ences. In all design, there is never enough data to pro­vide an objec­tive rec­om­men­da­tion to every design deci­sion. At best, the research might offer a clean delin­eation of the trade­offs involved in gen­eral cat­e­gories of deci­sions, but ulti­mately, it is the designer who must make the final deci­sion, and they must make that deci­sion with their intu­ition. When I design tools and nota­tions, I might make a hun­dred design deci­sions a day, with only one backed up by empir­i­cal data.
Empiri­cism then, is best suited at arm­ing the designer with the most objec­tive and reli­able intu­ition that data can pro­vide. And that means that the most impor­tant part of empir­i­cal research to get right in the soft sci­ences is to have the designer get the data. That’s right: your pro­gram­mers must observe the phe­nom­ena they will sup­port. They must become experts in the domain. They must under­stand it with such detail that when faced with the small­est of pro­gram­ming deci­sions, they have an empir­i­cally grounded intu­ition about what will work and what will not, and a deep sense of the trade­offs of their choice.

If we really need empiri­cism to cul­ti­vate intu­ition, what is the value of report­ing empir­i­cal data? I don’t per­son­ally believe that read­ing a report of another researcher’s obser­va­tions is nearly as enlight­en­ing. But what it can do is change what researchers look for and how they inter­pret their own obser­va­tions. The role of the research com­mu­nity is to tem­per indi­vid­ual obser­va­tions with a broader col­lec­tion of data. This is how we gen­er­al­ize and val­i­date our expe­ri­ences, in the search for truth. We just have to make sure that in the process of seek­ing truth, we expose the design­ers and engi­neers who will be build­ing our world to as much of real­ity as we can.