I'll add two more that I find important to the "Strategies" category:
1. Write things down. Have an assumption? Write it down. Then write down how you will test your assumption and the results.
2. Being able to systematically enumerate possibilities and rule them out one by one, often times indirectly. Yes, one needs to understand the system but one also needs to have a good strategy to use that knowledge. By "indirectly," I mean being able to reason like so: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore not P.
1. Write things down. Have an assumption? Write it down. Then write down how you will test your assumption and the results.
2. Being able to systematically enumerate possibilities and rule them out one by one, often times indirectly. Yes, one needs to understand the system but one also needs to have a good strategy to use that knowledge. By "indirectly," I mean being able to reason like so: If P, then Q. Not Q. Therefore not P.