Finalized a couple of weeks ago the MasterClass with Bill Nye about Science and Problem-Solving (trailer below).
The approx. 3 hours of content was time well spent and I could take several takeaways for my professional and personal life.
The key messages I took were the following:
Use science and its methodology to change your perspective and hopefully simplify the issue at hand.
Explore and study as much as possible all domains:
trivia is not trivial →you should know the little things that will enable you to understand the macro-ones,
indulge your curiosity,
embrace discrepant events, understand the entropy concept (i.e. a state of disorder will increase, not decrease, through time), and be cognizant that when the unexpected happens an opportunity to learn is generated.
Practice Critical Thinking:
pursue the scientifical method (observe, raise the question, create a hypothesis, experiment, analyze and make a conclusion) to help you think critically,
avoid information overload,
challenge personal beliefs,
filter the claims before assessing it → is the claim specific or is too vague and not testable,
use Occam’s Razor principle → usually the simplest explanation is the correct one,
validate if the conclusion presented to you can be independently verifiable,
watch-out for red-flags → is there a solid source to support the claim, does the conclusion/claim benefits a specific group of interests, does it contradict previous knowledge, is it something that you wanted to be true?
Achieve freedom from fear:
fear leads you to Type I thinking and you should try to use Type II (refer to Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman)
redirect your attention and effort in a productive way,
awareness that fear prevents critical thinking,
use science to channel your fear into excitement.
Learn from others:
seek experts,
seek history,
improve collaboration.
While exploring a problem use the inverted pyramid of design
Design phase → good design (the vortex) is the most important phase as it supports all the other phases (e.g. How to solve the problem, what is the question you want to answer). If you have 60 minutes to solve a problem, take 59 to think about it and 1 to actually solve it → Enstein.
Procurement phase → what are the best materials, data, software, knowledge people that will help solve the problem,
Fabrication phase → where, based on the design and procurement phase, actually solve the problem.
Marketing/Selling phase → how to you communicate the message in the correct and timely way.
Celebrate the constraints:
usually, constraints are the rules you have to play with,
usually, constraints are safeties needed in the form of specifications/regulations to avoid catastrophes or unintended effects,
would require a better design of the solution.