The Difference
How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?
How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?
Cueball pulls a lever. A bolt of lightning comes down and strikes him.
After being dazed for a moment, the comic then takes one of two routes; the first is that of a normal person, the second that of a scientist.
In Randall's example, the normal person would decide not to pull the lever anymore, because it seems to cause him to get struck by a bolt of lightning.
But the scientist would pull the lever again to see if it was just a coincidence or if the lever actually caused the bolt of lightning. A scientist requires that results be repeatable before he accepts the results.
The title text refers to the scientist's method of pulling the lever again and again, trying to understand how the machine works, as opposed to the normal person, just avoiding pain. This could be a nod towards how scientists sometimes go to extreme measures for knowledge.
For a different view on the topic of repetition in experimentation, see 1657: Insanity.