A recent paper by Gonzalo Génova in the Communications of the ACM talks about the role of empirical evidence in evaluating computer science research. The article talks about computer science in general but it reminds me of Henry Lieberman’s 2003 paper The Tyranny of Evaluation, which attacks the tendency in HCI to reject papers describing groundbreaking systems and techniques solely due to their lack of empirical evidence. Henry makes a comparison to Galileo’s experiments of dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. As he eloquently puts it: “Trouble is, people aren’t balls.“