2 - The Null Hypothesis

Toye Oyelese

Hello again, and welcome back to Navigating Blind. I'm Dr. Toye Oyelese, and today we're rolling up our sleeves and looking squarely at the foundation of everything I do—what I like to call the null hypothesis. It’s funny, growing up, I didn’t have a name for what I was doing. I just sort of, well, muddled through with whatever tools I had. But by the time I was eleven, I’d learned three lessons the hard way: you can’t fully perceive, you can’t control, and you definitely can’t fully understand reality. And this—it wasn’t some tidy philosophy class realization. For me, it started with blindness. Not total blindness, but enough that things got, well, blurry. I was a kid in Nigeria, and there were times when my eyes would simply refuse to cooperate—the world became a smear of colors and sounds, and I had to navigate with, I mean, honestly, no warning. You realize real quick that what you’re perceiving isn’t always what’s happening out there. Sometimes it isn’t even close.

Toye Oyelese

Now, some people think that kind of uncertainty makes you cautious or, I don’t know, humble. But for me, it made me accurate. See, where I grew up, there wasn’t one explanation for things—there were, like, three or four right in your face every day. Traditional beliefs on one side, religious teachings—Islam one day, Christianity the next—then all the stuff left over from the British colonial days...all jostling for space. And each one had its own story, its own “truth,” and none of them really fit together. Yet people I really respected—my parents, my teachers, neighbors, the guy at the bus stop—every one of them believed one of those systems, and often, believed it all the way. I became skeptical, not in the ‘let’s throw everything out’ way, but in this gentle, patient way. You just see the limits of any single story, right? I used to listen to my uncle explain something with absolute certainty, then walk down the road and hear a completely different explanation, spoken with just as much confidence.

Toye Oyelese

It’s, uh, sort of like, trying to read road signs in the rain, you know? You catch enough to keep moving, but you’re always aware there might be more out there you’re not catching. And then, as I grew a bit older, those big questions started circling—"How do you pick which explanation is actually true?" And, I’ll be honest, for a long time, I thought I was supposed to have an answer. Like, someday, it would just make sense. But eventually I realized, most folks don’t really have one. And maybe, maybe you’re not meant to. Sometimes the lack of an answer is the answer.

Toye Oyelese

Fast forward a decade or two—I ended up in medicine. Which, let me tell you, is not the field for folks who are addicted to certainty. If anything, medical training hammered home, over and over, that you’re always making high-stakes decisions with incomplete knowledge. Patients walk in, they’re hurting, they’re worried, and you—well, you have to act. You can’t just sit in your office waiting for the perfect, complete answer, because sometimes people are counting on you to decide right now. Every day, you’re choosing a route forward based on the best explanation you’ve got…which is rarely the whole truth, but it’s the best the situation gives you.

Toye Oyelese

I remember, oh, many years back, I was doing a stint in remote Alberta—tiny town, everyone knows everyone. A middle-aged gentleman walked in, fever, fatigue, a weird ache that just didn’t fit any textbook. The urge, especially when you’re newly minted, is to wait, to run every test, to get every answer. But out there, sometimes there’s no lab for three hundred kilometers. So, you build your working theory, you act as if it’s true—give the antibiotics, follow up, adjust as you learn more. Maybe your first guess is wrong. Maybe the next one is closer. But each time you revise your theory and do the next right thing. It’s, you know, provisional knowledge.

Toye Oyelese

I’ve always liked the idea—Popper’s falsificationism, though, honestly, I didn’t know to call it that until much later. You make a hypothesis, you test it against reality, you keep what works, you throw out what doesn’t. Rinse and repeat. That’s what medicine is all day—heck, that’s what life is! Not believing you have the final answer, but acting as if what you know is ‘good enough for now’ until reality proves otherwise. I think, uh, the key is never pretending that success equals truth. Results might look good, but that doesn’t mean you’ve solved the whole puzzle.

Toye Oyelese

And—and here’s where it gets personal. There was a moment—I can still picture it, I was reviewing a particularly odd chart, and it just hit me: "I would have to know everything about everything to really make anything make sense." Most people would find that frustrating or even despairing, but for me? Weirdly, it was a relief. I could stop expecting myself to know it all. Instead, I could focus on building working, functional explanations, knowing they’re always up for revision.

Toye Oyelese

Sometimes people ask if this all just makes me an agnostic—if I’m saying we can’t ever know. But I don’t quite buy that. See, agnosticism feels like a closed door: "We can’t know, end of story." But what I’m talking about is a process, an ongoing, open-ended dance with reality. I start with not-knowing, and then test, build, test again. The knowledge I use is always conditional, always up for grabs. But it’s still knowledge—it lets me act, make choices, and, well, navigate.

Toye Oyelese

Sometimes—okay, let me just give an example. I remember, not so long ago, I was on a phone call with a specialist in Vancouver. I’d run into this absolutely rare syndrome—frankly, I’m not even going to try to pronounce it without my notes, or I’ll mangle it, and there are probably medical students listening. Anyway, I nervously checked the diagnosis three times before saying it out loud. Because that’s what you do. You admit what you don’t know, you ask, you test, you stay honest about your limits. There’s no shame in that. In fact, it’s what keeps you safe.

Toye Oyelese

I sometimes think about what it feels like to stand on the edge of Okanagan Lake at night. You stare out, and there’s this vastness. You can’t see the end, you just hear waves, feel the sand shift beneath your toes. There’s this, uh, sense of how small you are, how little you can ever really grasp. And honestly, I find comfort there. Blindness isn’t defeat—it’s just being honest about where you stand. I can’t see the destination, I can’t guarantee the outcome, but I can take the next step. I can reach out my hand for whatever comes next.

Toye Oyelese

So no, I don’t see this as cowardice, or a refusal to commit. My whole life’s been a commitment—testing these provisional theories, trusting the process, accepting that "not-knowing" isn’t the same as paralysis. I just refuse to confuse what works with some kind of ultimate truth. That’s the spirit behind Navigating Blind—the null hypothesis underpins it all. Each framework I share, each tool, they’re built for navigation, not for certainty. They’re meant for real life, with all its mess and unpredictability.

Toye Oyelese

Next time, we’ll dig deeper into something I hinted at today—binary outcomes, and how, at the root, all complexity really does boil down to "want" and "don’t want." That’s how theory meets practice, and how biology meets experience. But until then, just remember: survive first, then thrive. I’m Dr. Toye Oyelese, and this is Navigating Blind. Take care till next time.