A lot of these type of tricks try to reduce a problem that is not reducible, at least not in a general way. This sounds great when read to oneself, but the mome

A lot of these type of tricks try to reduce a problem that is not reducible, at least not in a general way. This sounds great when read to oneself, but the moment you actually think about it for more than a second you realize the bullshit that this type of advice really is. Namely, there is never only one reason why something is the case at each of the 5 steps. It's usually a linear combination of various causes with different weights. Furthermore the reasons are not definitive, sometimes at best you can assign a vague probability to each. And finally there are unknown unknowns, the inexplicable. You may only have an intuition about something, but cannot put it into words. Remember often times intuition can be spot on and identify things that your conscious mind may not have access to.