Many of our default intuitions about how to pursue uncertain ideas are counterproductive:
We often try easier tasks first, when instead we should try the most informative tasks first.
We often conflate a high-level approach with a low-level instantiation of the approach.
We are often too slow to try to disprove our own ideas.
Building frameworks that reify the research process as a concrete search problem can help unearth these incorrect intuitions and replace them with systematic reasoning.
As further reading I recently came across Research as a Stochastic Decision Process, which discusses another systematic approach to research.
Summary copy pasted from the article:
Summary
Many of our default intuitions about how to pursue uncertain ideas are counterproductive:
We often try easier tasks first, when instead we should try the most informative tasks first.
We often conflate a high-level approach with a low-level instantiation of the approach.
We are often too slow to try to disprove our own ideas.
Building frameworks that reify the research process as a concrete search problem can help unearth these incorrect intuitions and replace them with systematic reasoning.