Attention Techonlogy

by Max Moreau

How to Use The Scientific Method to Live a More Productive Life

The Scientific Method has been around for centuries, evidence is extant of it’s use as far back as Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, developing into rational theories of nature in Ancient Greece. In Europe, the scientific method lost a lot of its appeal between the classical times and the renaissance, during that time the argument from authority was foremost prevalent as religion dominated public discourse. Thanks to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, science has become almost a religion to many followers, they look to it for the answers to their questions and for the ultimate secrets of reality. Despite the solid basis in science of modern technology, lots of people still follow the argument from authority model of the Middle Ages. Have you ever stopped to question your deepest held beliefs? Or even to examine your daily life, see if you’re really doing what you want to be doing? Well, in this article I hope to give a basic description of the Scientific Method and give you some ways to use it in your daily life to become happier and more productive.

Explaining the Method

The Scientific Method, though it seems a grandiose, over-arching concept, is actually quite simple, one model of it consists of the following:

Observation

Everyone observes their world, they see things happening, but they’re not specifically manipulating it to see what happens under what circumstances. We see things happen in context and we make assumptions based on this.

Theory

These assumptions create a rough theory which we use to understand the world. We all have theories about the world, based on our general observations, or assumptions passed down to us by the media or our parents. For example, you may have been treated cruelly by your family or peers, so you get the idea that people in general are evil.

Hypothesis

Based on your initial theory, you make a prediction or hypothesis in order to test it. For example, if you were to test the above idea that people in general are no good, you might make the prediction that if you had an accident in public, no one would come to help you.

Experiment

Now you come up with a way to test your prediction. The above prediction is that people would not help you if they saw you had an accident. To test this, you might pretend to fall over in the street with many people around and see how many people help you.

Results

This is what happens when you run the experiment. In the above example, lets say there were 10 people around you and 6 stopped to help.

Theory

Now we’re back where we started. We take the results and use them to create a refined theory about the world. Based on the above results you might now think ‘most people are good, but a significant portion are evil’, but this is still a very broad theory, more experimentation is needed to refine it. For example, you might wonder ‘what makes people evil?’ assuming some people are inherently evil, or you might wonder ‘are those 4 people truely evil, or was there some other reason for them not helping me?’, the list is almost endless, which is what makes science such a fruitful endeavour.

Application

But now the application of all this, how can it help you? So fruitful is science that it can also help in your daily life. Let’s use the example of updating your blog to show how this can work in practice.

Observation

So, you just started a new blog and want to keep it updated every week. You keep it running about a month and you realise you’ve only updated it once. You wonder what could be the cause of this, you notice that each time you go to type up an entry, you can’t think of what to write.

Theory

Based on these observations, you come up with the theory that maybe you don’t have enough material to write about. Now you need to put this to the test.

Hypothesis

The first step to testing a theory is developing a hypothesis or prediction. In this instance, you might predict that more research will give you more material and thus you’ll write more entries on your blog. Now you test this.

Experiment

So, you read up on the subject you intend to write about in your blog, you write down several things that you might like to write about and you see if, as a result, you write more entries on your blog.

Results

The results show how your theory holds up. In this instance, lets say you wrote three entries, two more than last month.

Theory

Now, you have to assimilate the results. You wrote two more articles, so perhaps your original theory was correct, you just needed more information. Perhaps also, you were just temporarily motivated and this will fade over time, more evidence, i.e. experimentation, is needed to be sure.

In practical terms, as in science itself, experimentation is an ongoing endeavour. A sensible approach is to track your progress and use it to test your theories. For example, you could keep a track of all your blog entries. This month you tested whether lack of material was the issue, if next month you return to your old habit of not updating your blog frequently enough, based on the data you collect, you can refine your old theory or come up with a new one, perhaps you’re not motivated enough. Then your experiment could be to motivate yourself more this month and observe any change in the data.

In this way, the scientific method doesn’t have to be an obtruse tool used by scientists investigating the structure of the atom, it is a practical instrument that can be used by anyone to improve their productivity and day to day living.

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