Not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through constant work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.–Goethe

And I don’t mean reading.

The question stems from the conceited sounding question: How did I get so far in so many fields?

I started thinking about method, but then when I asked “What method led to that method?” I realized I had committed the rationalist error of focusing too narrowly on the conceptual, which cannot be first.  I got far from passion, passion that began to reflect on itself.

(This doesn’t address what made my development different than others with passion.  Two things: 1) not becoming overspecialized/discipline-bound/career-bound and 2) finding a renewable energy source for my passion: not just a worthy goal, but a goal that gives reason to “speed” in knowledge.  As well as this post.)

I guess this isn’t really about “method” overall, because method is a piece of an overall theory or worldview, which I’m not presenting here.  It’s more about techniques.

One technique is modeling.  It’s something I often did though I got the use as a research term from NLP.  If someone’s doing something you want to do, model them (intellectually this often boils down to: read everything they wrote.)

One of my favorites is triangulating different positions.  Research the different positions on an issue (especially minority ones) and try to find a view that can account for all of them.  A key part of this and my other favorite technique is to look for disagreement (or do a broad search).  One has to develop heuristics (rules for processing) to speed this along, which one can do through experience (partially necessary) and through researching the fields of cognitive biases and probability theory specifically for general heuristics, but there are domain-specific heuristics (or perhaps they’re only applications or combinations of the other ones, but one gets better at detecting how they manifest in certain domain-specific ways.)  For instance, in the field of medicine and nutrition I see two common biases: one: medical researchers are idiotic (narrowly focused as in idiom in a dumb way).  They’re so overly specialized in specific fields of biology they often don’t know the research in other ones, much less understand “reasoning” in general.  (The flip-side of this is that your doctor doesn’t know even that research!)  Two: the focus on discovering something one can mass produce to sell exercises a heavy hand over the whole research process.  The “alternative” medicine people have their own specific trends of biases one can start to detect as well of course.

Another technique is to understand the source of disagreement.  What is the basis for the disagreement?  How could it arise?  How could it continue?  While it is easy to fall into the trap of explaining away what you disagree with yourself, if you can account for why others disagree with your view, then you can be even more confident of it.

Look for those tiny bits of evidence that cause a flicker of doubt.  (There’s a cognitive bias/default to use our reason to find evidence to support our first guesses.)  In some ways, this derives from all the above techniques, and in other ways, is perhaps the most important.  It is very easy to get trapped in a black hole of a particular worldview or discipline or whatever, a black hole made not of gravity but of self-confirming ideas.  Academic scenes and specialties are little different than subcultures like goths–the main difference is that academics are more hypocritical.  ”Agreeing to disagree” when it comes to knowledge is mainly to either agree that the other person’s a fool or that your evidence isn’t that good.  At best, it’s agreeing that there isn’t good evidence either way–or you don’t understand it, which means not that you should agree to disagree because why have an opinion without good evidence?  How does one avoid these traps?  Traps that essentially the whole intellectual elite is caught in?  On the level of technique, perhaps looking for that flicker of doubt and seizing on it.  But technique can only take you so far.

This Overcoming Bias post and its prereq post reading should allow one to derive how the above is an extension of Bayesian reasoning for a more rigorous exposition of these techniques.