Repost: Extreme Thinking

About a year ago I gave an hour-long seminar on “Extreme Thinking” to a lay audience at a conference on “Tough Learning”. I thought the essay might be of interest to people who enjoy things like my current series on principles of effective research, and so I’m reposting it.

The “Extreme Thinking” essay differs in two important ways from my ongoing series: (a) it is intended for an audience of non-scientists, and thus needs to be very general; and (b) it is a finished product, and thus is more polished.

Like the Principles series, much of what I say in the present essay is obvious and well-known. Nonetheless, I’m convinved that many of my personal difficulties (and those of others) in doing research come from not doing the obvious things correctly, thus this essay.

Essay: HTML, ASCII, PDF, Microsoft Word.

Presentation: PDF, Powerpoint.