How To Actually Change Your Mind

A sequence on the ultra-high-level ultimate technique of rationality: How to actually change your mind.

Posts in this collection are scattered across widely ranging dates and times.

Subsequences

Politics is the Mind-Killer

Most important posts:

• A Fable of Science and Politics
• Politics is the Mind-Killer
• Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided
• The Scales of Justice, the Notebook of Rationality
• Reversed Stupidity is Not Intelligence
• Argument Screens Off Authority
• Hug the Query

Death Spirals and the Cult Attractor

Most important posts:

• The Affect Heuristic
• The Halo Effect
• Affective Death Spirals
• Resist the Happy Death Spiral
• Uncritical Supercriticality

Seeing with Fresh Eyes

Most important posts:

• Anchoring and Adjustment
• We Change Our Minds Less Often Than We Think
• Hold Off On Proposing Solutions
• Do We Believe Everything We're Told?
• Cached Thoughts
• Asch's Conformity Experiment
• Lonely Dissent
• The Genetic Fallacy

Noticing Confusion

(Heavy overlap with Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions.)

• Your Strength as a Rationalist
• Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
• Hindsight Bias
• Hindsight Devalues Science
• Positive Bias: Look Into the Dark

Against Rationalization

• Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People
• Conservation of Expected Evidence
• Update Yourself Incrementally
• One Argument Against An Army
• The Bottom Line
• What Evidence Filtered Evidence?
• Rationalization
• A Rational Argument
• Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points
• Motivated Stopping and Motivated Continuation
  • A Case Study of Motivated Continuation
• Fake Justification
• Fake Optimization Criteria
• Is That Your True Rejection?
• Entangled Truths, Contagious Lies
  • Of Lies and Black Swan Blowups
• Anti-Epistemology
  • The Sacred Mundane

Against Doublethink

• Belief in Belief
• Singlethink
• Doublethink: Choosing to be Biased
• No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
• Belief in Self-Deception
• Moore's Paradox
• Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive

Overly Convenient Excuses

• The Proper Use of Humility
• The Third Alternative
• Privileging the Hypothesis (and its requisites, like Locating the hypothesis)
• But There's Still A Chance, Right?
  • The Fallacy of Gray
  • Absolute Authority
  • How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3
  • Infinite Certainty
  • 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities

Letting Go

• Feeling Rational
• The Importance of Saying "Oops"
  • The Crackpot Offer
  • Just Lose Hope Already
• The Proper Use of Doubt
• You Can Face Reality
• The Meditation on Curiosity
• Something to Protect
• No One Can Exempt You From Rationality's Laws
• Leave a Line of Retreat
• Crisis of Faith
  • The Ritual (short story)

See also

• Locating the hypothesis and Privileging the hypothesis
• Litany of Gendlin and Litany of Tarski