> Imagine if I said "People who skip breakfast are worse at their jobs". Its so vague, its always true.
That's a terrible example of your point. As long as you can define a metric for "worse at their jobs" (it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to) then you have a really clear and testable hypothesis.
>it'll vary a ton based on which job we're talking about, but it still sounds like something you could assign a metric to
This is the problem, you didn't you can find 100000000 ways for it to be correct. 'They didn't eat breakfast, and they spent 1 second on HN. Therefore breakfast would have been better.'
As long as you can define some measure of "worse at their jobs", which corporations routinely do, this seems like an easy thing to falsify.
Go get employee eval scores and poll everyone on whether they eat breakfast.
You usually have to ask people to change their behavior. Pretty straight forward in this case though.