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whpearson comments on Open Thread: February 2010, part 2 - Less Wrong
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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 way. That is the answer "For Science!" has to hold some weight, even if it is less weight than is currently ascribed to it.
Yep. IOW the catechism can be used to discriminate between "fundamental" science, so-called, and applied engineering projects.
There's a (subtle, perhaps) difference between advocating catechisms or checklists normatively ("this is a useful standard to compare yourself to") and prescriptively ("do it this way or do it elsehwere"). To put yet another domain on the table, inability to draw the distinction plagues the project management professional community. "Methodologies" or "processes" are too often, and inappropriately, seen as edicts rather than sources of good ideas.
How about applying the catechism to LessWrong as a product development project? ;)