It appears like I’m accumulating pet peeves at an alarming rate. In all probability, I am guilty of most of them myself, but that is no reason not to complain about them on the internet. For example: Spend some time in a genetics lab, and you will probably hear talk of ”validation” and ”optimization”. But those things rarely happen in a lab.

According to a dictionary, to ”optimize” means to make something as good as possible. That is almost never possible, nor desirable. What we really do is change things until they work according to some accepted standard. That is not optimization; that is tweaking.

To ”validate” means to confirm to that something is true, which is rarely possible. Occasionally we have something to compare to that you are really sure about, so that if a method agrees with it, we can be pretty certain that it works. But a lot of time, we don’t know the answer. The best we can do is to gather additional evidence.

Additional evidence, ideally from some other method with very different assumptions, is great. So is adjusting a protocol until it performs sufficiently well. So why not just say what we mean?

”You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.”