The section on ‘How do you do it?’ looks like a generalised version of John Platt’s Strong Inference, a method of doing science that he believed ‘makes for rapid and powerful progress’. The essence of Strong Inference is to think carefully about a scientific question (the goal) to identify the main competing hypotheses that have yet to be discriminated between (the blockers), and devise and perform experiment(s) that rapidly discriminate between them (taking responsibility to remove the blockers and actually perform the next step).
Strong inference consists of applying the following steps to every problem in science, formally and explicitly and regularly:
1) Devising alternative hypotheses;
2) Devising a crucial experiment (or several of them), with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will, as nearly as possible, exclude one or more of the hypotheses;
3) Carrying out the experiment so as to get a clean result;
1′) Recycling the procedure, making subhypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain; and so on.
He also favoured Actually Thinking, as opposed to scientific busywork:
We speak piously of taking measurements and making small studies that will “add another brick to the temple of science.” Most such bricks just lie around the brickyard. Tables of constants have their place and value, but the study of one spectrum after another, if not frequently re-evaluated, may become a substitute for thinking, a sad waste of intelligence in a research laboratory, and a mistraining whose crippling effects may last a lifetime.
The section on ‘How do you do it?’ looks like a generalised version of John Platt’s Strong Inference, a method of doing science that he believed ‘makes for rapid and powerful progress’. The essence of Strong Inference is to think carefully about a scientific question (the goal) to identify the main competing hypotheses that have yet to be discriminated between (the blockers), and devise and perform experiment(s) that rapidly discriminate between them (taking responsibility to remove the blockers and actually perform the next step).
He also favoured Actually Thinking, as opposed to scientific busywork: