There does not exist a single methodology that can always avoid local minima/maxima, short of somehow brute forcing the entire design space. (If evaluating the design space and locating the best design is somehow not an NP-hard problem, it is close enough for human purposes.) Accusing one methodology of producing local minima/maxima is therefore a noop. One must demonstrate that it is somehow more prone to such a result.
Good luck with that. I would despair of even getting the definitions correct, let alone demonstrating a result with even minimal rigor.
My intuitive feel is that if you feel like testing is getting you stuck in a local optima, this is more likely to be because your testing is actually giving enough sense of how your design fares that you can actually feel you are in a local optima, rather than the usual situation where you are just clueless, happy about it, and not even in a local optima, let alone the global one. You can't blame the equipment that allows you to detect that your are in a local optimum for getting you stuck in it; that's textbook observation bias.
There doesn't exist a single data-driven methodology that can avoid local maxima without brute force the entire design space. Conceptualizing things and being creative is what avoids local maxima.
Nope. Being a human is not the magic algorithm for finding global optima. We aren't anywhere near that smart. There's no methodology for finding the global maxima, period.
Good luck with that. I would despair of even getting the definitions correct, let alone demonstrating a result with even minimal rigor.
My intuitive feel is that if you feel like testing is getting you stuck in a local optima, this is more likely to be because your testing is actually giving enough sense of how your design fares that you can actually feel you are in a local optima, rather than the usual situation where you are just clueless, happy about it, and not even in a local optima, let alone the global one. You can't blame the equipment that allows you to detect that your are in a local optimum for getting you stuck in it; that's textbook observation bias.