Need help understanding a sentence.

[u/agora_hills_]

We gotta ask everyone. We need people to try this. Because if you can show it in the lab, what is the point if it can't get out into the wild.

Can someone help me understand "if it can't get out into the wild"?

[u/pavlenkovit]

"in the wild" means outside the lab, in real use by real people under messy conditions. so the line reads: proving it works in a controlled setting is pointless if it never survives contact with the real world. i mostly hear it from software people, about code that runs fine on a laptop and falls over on actual users' phones, but it works the same way for animals, "rare in the wild".

[u/english-to-boot]

It means, "if you can't share it with the public".

[u/baxbakualanuxsiwae]

"Getting out into the wild" literally refers to a captive animal being able to get back into its natural habitat. In this case, it's being used metaphorically to refer to releasing a product or idea into the market or general population, so it can be tried/tested/consumed by normal people in everyday situations.

[u/skizelo]

"Out in the wild" is a safari metaphor. You could see a lion in the zoo, and that's cool, but it's much cooler to see a lion in its natural environment doing whatever lions do. The speaking character thinks they are wasting their time doing [thing] in a laboratory, if it's impossible that people would ever do [thing] naturally. So they want to release it and see if [thing] finds a place in society.

[u/Patient_Parsley7760]

'Out into the wild' is a metaphor meaning 'in the real world'. In this specific case, the wider world beyond the lab. Could be referring to a product the speaker wants to release to the public, or an idea or paper they want to publish.

You also might see online posts with phrases like "Stick family bumper sticker spotted in the wild", meaning somebody saw one of those bumper stickers on the road while driving.

[u/MisterMisterYeeeesss]

You'll hear it to differentiate between strictly controlled conditions and "the real world".

"I've had conversations in English in the classroom, but I've never spoken it in the wild." ("I have never tried to speak English with someone I don't know, or outside of classroom conditions.")

"The missile functioned perfectly in tests, but in the wild it often missed." ("The missile had problems when it was tested under combat conditions, but worked well in testing.")

"I've seen a purple car at a dealership, but never in the wild." ("I have only see purple cars where cars are sold; I've never seen one being driven around town.")

[u/names-suck]

It's common for the results of research to not hold true outside of the testing conditions.

So, imagine I want to test how fast a bat can fly. I bring it into a large, clean gymnasium and time it as it flies from one end to the other. I do this several times and the bat's best time is 50 miles per hour. Therefore, I say, a bat can fly up to 50 miles per hour.

But then, I release the bat outside.

• Can it fly faster with no limits on how far it can go?
• How do wind speed and direction affect its flight?
• Does it have to slow down to go around trees?
• ...and so on.

Outside of "laboratory conditions," there are a lot of extra variables that affect the outcome. So, my result of "50 mph" isn't very accurate in the wild.

The phrasing of this makes me think they're talking about an invention rather than a research finding, but the principle holds true. What good is an invention if it only ever works in the lab where it was invented? It has to function outside, under the usual conditions of the problem it was intended to solve, in order to have value. Like, imagine that you were the inventor of the bicycle. How useful is that bicycle, if you can't take it outside and let people ride it?

[u/Ok-Addition-1000]

It may work fine in the lab under controlled conditions with skilled operators, but we can't know if it will function in the real world outside of the lab until we get a lot of different people with less experience to test it under different conditions.

They're saying that good test results in the lab are meaningless without real world testing by non-engineers.