Like some other people have said, one of my biggest tip-offs is if I have a strong negative reaction to something. Often this happens if I’m reading a not-particularly-objective report, experiment, treatise or something which could have been written with strong biases. My mind tends to recoil at the obvious biases and wants to reject the entire thing, but then the rational part of me kicks in and forces me to read through the whole thing before parsing an emotional reaction. After all, a point of being rational is to be able to sieve through other writers’ biases to see if they actually have important points buried inside, otherwise you don’t know what accuracies you might miss, or what biases you’re giving into yourself. I find this also happens if I myself have a bias that I’ve never thought of before; I instantly have a gut reaction that feels at first natural, but almost an instant later, very out of place. Then I realise that I haven’t taken in all the information, I haven’t evaluated it as objectively as I can, and I haven’t arrived at an accurate conclusion. I’ve just gone. “No, x is bad because y makes me feel bad!”.
The other thing (perhaps more importantly for my personal wellbeing) would be if I actually perform an action that is inconsistent with my rationalist world-view, such as if I did something illogical or something that would contradict a view that I hold as being morally and rationally just. These are usually things that I’d permit myself to do without thinking much when I was younger, but now would seem like abhorrent double-standards and ‘unjust’ behaviour (perhaps they’d even make me feel disproportionately guilty, but it seems to me that often acting illogically should make you feel that way!)
Like some other people have said, one of my biggest tip-offs is if I have a strong negative reaction to something. Often this happens if I’m reading a not-particularly-objective report, experiment, treatise or something which could have been written with strong biases. My mind tends to recoil at the obvious biases and wants to reject the entire thing, but then the rational part of me kicks in and forces me to read through the whole thing before parsing an emotional reaction. After all, a point of being rational is to be able to sieve through other writers’ biases to see if they actually have important points buried inside, otherwise you don’t know what accuracies you might miss, or what biases you’re giving into yourself. I find this also happens if I myself have a bias that I’ve never thought of before; I instantly have a gut reaction that feels at first natural, but almost an instant later, very out of place. Then I realise that I haven’t taken in all the information, I haven’t evaluated it as objectively as I can, and I haven’t arrived at an accurate conclusion. I’ve just gone. “No, x is bad because y makes me feel bad!”.
The other thing (perhaps more importantly for my personal wellbeing) would be if I actually perform an action that is inconsistent with my rationalist world-view, such as if I did something illogical or something that would contradict a view that I hold as being morally and rationally just. These are usually things that I’d permit myself to do without thinking much when I was younger, but now would seem like abhorrent double-standards and ‘unjust’ behaviour (perhaps they’d even make me feel disproportionately guilty, but it seems to me that often acting illogically should make you feel that way!)