F Coda

This chapter suggests that you can improve your scientific thinking skills, espe­cially thinking about the hypothesis, by stepping outside the zone of your fa­miliar habits:

•Practice finding the hidden hypothesis in published papers.

• Diagram the logical relationships between a hypothesis and the experiments that test it.

• Avoid the curse of knowledge, whether in communicating with others or to yourself.

• Take an outside view of what you're doing.

• Ask yourself what your hypothesis can explain that you didn't set out to explain.

• Avoid the sunk cost fallacy; when your hypothesis is falsified, let it go.

• Invent several explicit hypotheses to account for any one phenomenon.

• Think like a trader to keep from being too invested in any one hypothesis.

• Train your insight and intuition with heuristics and approximations.