The Open Thread posted at the beginning of the month has gotten really, really big, so I've gone ahead and made another one. Post your new discussions here!
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
The point of such "catechisms" isn't so much to have all the answers, rather to ensure that you have divided your attention evenly among a reasonable set of questions at the outset, in an effort to avoid "motivated cognition" - focusing on the thinking you find easy or pleasant to do, as opposed to the thinking that's necessary.
The idea is to improve at predicting your predictable failures. If this kind of thinking turns up a thorny question you don't know how to answer, you can lay the current project aside until you have solved the thorny question, as a matter of prudent dependency management.
A related example is surgery checklists. They work (see Atul Gawande's Better). Surgeons hate them - their motivated cognition focuses on the technically juicy bits of surgery, they feel that trivia such as checking which side limb they're operating on is beneath them.
I'm a big believer in surgery checklists. However I'm yet to be convinced that the catechisms will be beneficial unaltered to any research project.
A lot of science is about doing experiments that we don't know the outcomes of and serendipitously discover things. Two examples that spring to mind are superconductivity and fullerene production.
If you asked each of the discoverers to justify their research by the catechisms you probably would have got no where near the actual results. This potential for serendipity should be built into the catechisms in some w... (read more)