Failing Fast

Trying to fail may sound like a truly odd concept. Trying to do it fast probably sounds even more bizarre, but there is a point to it.

When a problem itself is even remotely interesting, the solution is often not something that is easy to find. Many documents might be needed and little shards of evidence might need to be extracted from them and combined with clever logic in order to prove a hypothesis. It is often much easier and faster to disprove a a complicated hypothesis. Don’t even try to prove it at first. Try to disprove it immediately. Try to make it fail fast.

Say, for example, that you think your ancestor John Doe of South Succotash is the same man as an earlier John Doe who lived in West Windfall. There might be many subtle clues that point you in that direction. There might be some inconsistencies that seem so easy to explain that you start to think that the two men really might be the same. What if you find that their wives have different names? In South Succotash, John’s wife was Sally and in West Windfall you find she was Willa, but then find that the South Succotash John Doe had an earlier wife, that would seem to match the change in name for his wife, rather than being evidence of the two men being different, it is another hint that they might be the same.

In the example of the two John Does, we can be blinded by the generally wise research method of going from the known to the unknown. That means we generally research backwards in time. The South Succotash John Doe lived there back to a certain time and we hypothesize that before that he lived in West Windfall. Rather than trying to prove that they are the same man, which can require some intricate work, what if we research the John Doe of West Windfall and do it forward in time? We might quickly find that he disappears from the records there because he died there, not because he moved away. We might find Willa listed as “the widow of John Doe” long after she ought to have died, if the two men were the same. We might find him alive and well and living somewhere other than South Succotash. We might even find him in deeds selling land in West Windfall and even listed as “of South Succotash” but when his wife signed the deeds, she was Willa every time, not Sally. Instead of being the same man, we might have found that there was another John Doe of South Succotash and that he, not your John Doe, was the man from West Windfall.

There is a point to trying to disprove your hypotheses no matter what. If you look for evidence that might disprove a hypothesis and find that you can’t disprove it, you have taken an important step in proving it because you’ve eliminated some other possibilities. There is another point. Some of the research that might disprove your hypothesis will probably be fairly easy to do. Don’t save that for last. If the hypothesis is destined to fail, it is best if it fails fast.

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