I used to have an adage to the effect that if you walk away from an argument feeling like you’ve processed it before a month has passed, you’re probably kidding yourself. I’m not sure I would take such a strong line nowadays, but it’s a useful prompt to bear in mind. Might or might not be related to another thing I sometimes say, that it takes at least a month to even begin establishing a habit. While a perfect reasoner might consider all hypotheses in advance or be able to use past data to test new hypotheses, in practice it seems to me that being on the lookout for evidence for or against a new idea is often necessary to give the idea a fair shake, which feels like a very specific case of noticing (namely, noticing when incoming information bears on some new idea you heard and updating).
I used to have an adage to the effect that if you walk away from an argument feeling like you’ve processed it before a month has passed, you’re probably kidding yourself. I’m not sure I would take such a strong line nowadays, but it’s a useful prompt to bear in mind. Might or might not be related to another thing I sometimes say, that it takes at least a month to even begin establishing a habit. While a perfect reasoner might consider all hypotheses in advance or be able to use past data to test new hypotheses, in practice it seems to me that being on the lookout for evidence for or against a new idea is often necessary to give the idea a fair shake, which feels like a very specific case of noticing (namely, noticing when incoming information bears on some new idea you heard and updating).