My wife and I combined will make about $220k USD this year. We will spend about $120k and save about $80k and pay about $20k in taxes. We have 2 kids in elementary school.

We don’t have to worry about money, and that does make me feel wealthy. I am self employed and I work about 25 hours a week, and that makes for a pretty chill life.

That said, no I’m not wealthy by any standard aside from quality-of-life. We have two cars but they are 10 and 13 years old. We have a nice house in a nice area and we are lucky for that, but it is 60 years old, has a fuse box instead of circuit breakers, and is deteriorating faster than I can motivate myself to fix it.

Blackest Eyes by Porcupine Tree

Hypothesis testing is not of the form “what causes this?” What you’re suggesting seems to be along those lines.

Instead it’s more “can we say with high confidence that this specific factor causes this?”

That doesn’t mean you can’t test other factors! You can test them all with enough time and resources.

There are multi-factor statistical tools like ANOVA. But they still depend on you identifying what the factors might be.

But if you have factors A, B, C, and D in your analysis, and it’s actually the totally unknown factor E… you might find a lot of unexplained variance in your statistics, or you might mislead yourself into thinking it’s ABCD and never discover what E actually was.

But at the end of the day that’s just a fancier form of “does this specific thing cause this effect.”

And the essence of science is discovering Factor E and testing it, with new hypotheses.

My immediate emotional reaction is usually some degree of “have you misplaced your brain?” So it’s good to pause.

Same reason I have a 3 minute delay for outgoing emails.

For me: Solidworks, TwinCAT (lol @ plc software built on top of windows…and it’s one of the more open ones)

The right facial expressions will turn it into a contest they can’t resist