Understand the rules before you break them.....

In a different class I give a lecture on how to give an oral presentation. After going through a pretty big list of do's and don'ts I finish by pointing out that all good speakers will break one or more rules. In my mind though it is still important to understand the rules, not so you can slavishly follow them, but so you know when you are going against convention. Bottom line - always understand the rules before you break them. I think that is generally a good motto for life too.

That is why I go, as clearly as I can, through the scientific method, despite the fact that some fairly influential thinkers have argued that most scientists don't even operate in this way. Again, I would argue that it is vital to understand the rules so that you can see the consequences of breaking them. A noted Berkeley connection is the philosopher Paul Feyerabend who spent three decades associated with UC Berkeley. Feyerabend was critical of not just the idea of the scientific method but was also critical of the idea of the philosophy of science itself - a critical guy. You can read accessible and interesting introductions to his work at both Wikipedia and at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (My definition of 'accessible' is that you can read the article and understand what most of the words mean and the gist of what they are saying. My definition of 'interesting' is that it made me go hmmm.)

If you look at any article in a scientific journal you will also notice that it isn't neatly laid out like the slide I showed with 'Data', 'Hypothesis', 'Prediction' etc. Although these words will be tantalizingly scattered throughout the text. In a bid to demystify the somewhat arcane style of scientific writing, the journal Science has selected a number of scientific articles from that journal and annotated them, illustrating how different parts of each article embody the scientific method. This is part of the 'Keystones of Science project'. Here is an annotated example of the scientific method example titled Microbial Genes in the Human Genome: Lateral Transfer or Gene Loss?.

This time last year: Dr Dino versus the Amazing Randi