system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why are hypotheses used when doing research?

If the point of doing research is to figure something out, then why does the scientific community care about your guess before you ever do any experiments?
gpt
Let's say you want to figure out what makes grass grow.

How are you going to do that? What should you measure? There are a billion things you **could** measure, and billions of experiments you **could** run, but which ones should you focus on?

If you have a hypotheses (such as "I think grass needs oxygen to grow") you can easily design an experiment, test it, and either validate or reject your hypotheses. That is scientific progress.

If you don't have a hypotheses, you are likely just doing random stuff and it's hard to *learn* anything. ("I added blue confetti, and the grass still grew")