An important lesson comes from the origin of the word experiment. “Experiment” comes from the Latin ex-, meaning “of/from,” and periri, meaning “try/attempt.” It means, in other words, to get something by trying. The statistician David Moore, the 1998 president of the American Statistical Association, goes so far as to say: “If you don’t know what to measure, measure anyway. You’ll learn what to measure.”3 We might call Moore’s approach the Nike method: the “Just do it” school of thought.
