Earlier quoted context omitted.
Arguably you can only refute hypotheses, if you're of the empiricist mindset about testability, so in a sense that's even _more_ stringent. TRIZ seems to admit of situations where basically, you don't know enough about what your hypothesis ought to be that 'the scientific method' won't get you far enough, so you must proceed by walling off as much of your search space as possible as fast as possible by prioritizing t…
Doesn't this implicitly assume that the negatives are easier to enumerate than the positives? What is the test for this? Gut feeling?
In my experience, the lowest-hanging fruit tend to be negatives. Once those are gone, the negatives that are left require more creativity to ascertain.