- Pick an important topic.
- Try to do a little sustained thinking on the topic, always keeping close to the task at hand.
- Generalize outward from your chosen topic.
- Write in the language of your discipline but, of course, try to do so simply and clearly.
- If at all possible, reorganize existing evidence around your theory.
— Robert Trivers, How to write an important paper
Many features of the system will be unfamiliar and puzzling at first, but this puzzlement will soon disappear.
I think that psychology researchers will be better off when they forget about sums of squares, mean squares, and F tests, and instead focus on coefficients, variance components, and scale parameters.
If we wished to unpack all that is conveyed in describing an animal as gregarious, we should…have to produce an infinite series of different hypothetical propositions.
— Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind
Science is not a debating club.
— Alexander Weiss
You don’t want to get to the point where you are 100% confident.
— Thomas Bouchard
So long as we want to try to describe complex real-life phenomena as they occur in their natural settings, it seems to me that our chief alternatives are the literary essay and the path model.
— John C Loehlin, Latent Variable Models, 232