one of my favorite poems growing up was “ulysses” by alfred, lord tennyson. for those who’ve haven’t read it, tennyson recounts ulysses’ (odysseus in other longer works by homer & others) return home to ithaca after his decade-long travels. whether ulysses was resolute & heroic or quite the opposite upon his return home has never been clear to me (or to scholars who study literary works for that matter). but i’ve oscillated between both viewpoints time after time. i often reconcile this debate for myself (at least temporarily) by remembering that, like many things in life, the answer isn’t black & white — it’s grey. after all, tennyson didn’t merely recount the story of a man longing for more adventures. he wrote, rather, about a man who looked to the past to understand what he may embark on in the future. home in ithaca, although mundane to its protagonist, inspired longing for a future that mirrored the past.
something i think about often (with & without the help of 1830s blank verse poetry) is the nature of our standards for what is mundane versus remarkable. the nature of this battle, after all, is inherent in our criteria for statistical significance; it’s present in how we decide what is worthy of publishing, & by default, what is not worthy of publishing. these decisions trickle down to who gets tenure, who doesn’t — & they generally hold a great deal of weight in our field & beyond when it comes to real-world applications of our work.
thankfully, an increased awareness that the distinction between the mundane & the remarkable may not be black & white, but rather grey, has taken shape in our own community. discussions about the file-drawer problem have become a part of the broader conversation in our scientific enterprise. advisors in our graduate training programs encourage us to make our results go away in order to increase confidence that an effect is really there. & fellow researchers have written about how a null finding may in fact be just as informative as a statistically significant one. re-visiting our criteria for what is worthy enough to tell the world has started to become commonplace. what will come of these important re-considerations will also hold much weight in our field & beyond.
ulysses’ journey was never about our collective quest for scientific truths. but ulysses’ focus on what might be was, in some ways, colored by the lens of what used to be. i can’t help but think that we may be able to build a scientific future that also mirrors our scientific past. we’ve searched long & hard for validation of our alternative hypotheses embedded with remarkableness. we’ve searched less often for the seemingly mundane nulls. & while literary scholars can’t quite agree on what became of ulysses & his quest for the remarkable, increasing agreement as a field in our own quest seems promising; maybe one day, our future colleagues will agree that we sought to truly understand the past, with all its mundanity & remarkableness, in search for what we attempted to understand in the future.
tentative science 