While absorbing claims/information, track an estimate of the physical process which produced the information, and how that process entangles the information with physical reality.
When I read a technical paper about an experiment/study, I track in the back of my head a best-guess of what was actually going on during the experiment/study, separate from the authors’ claims and analysis. So e.g. “ok, the authors sure do seem to think Y happened, so maybe Y happened, but what else would make the authors think Y happened?”. Usually this includes things like “obviously X, Y, Z would be confounders”, and then checking whether the authors controlled for those things. Or “maybe the person doing this part was new to the technique and they just fucked up the experiment?”. Or “they say in the abstract that they controlled for X, but the obvious way of controlling for X would not actually fully control for it”. Or “this is one of those fields where the things-people-say-happened are mostly determined by political flavor, and basically not coupled to observation”. Etc.
More generally, when applied reflectively, “track an estimate of the physical process which produced the information, and how that process entangles the information with physical reality” is just the fundamental technique of epistemic rationality: what do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
The fundamental question of rationality, “What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?”, is on its strictest level a request for a causal model of how you think your brain ended up mirroring reality—the causal process which accounts for this supposed correlation.
Can you give an example?
When I read a technical paper about an experiment/study, I track in the back of my head a best-guess of what was actually going on during the experiment/study, separate from the authors’ claims and analysis. So e.g. “ok, the authors sure do seem to think Y happened, so maybe Y happened, but what else would make the authors think Y happened?”. Usually this includes things like “obviously X, Y, Z would be confounders”, and then checking whether the authors controlled for those things. Or “maybe the person doing this part was new to the technique and they just fucked up the experiment?”. Or “they say in the abstract that they controlled for X, but the obvious way of controlling for X would not actually fully control for it”. Or “this is one of those fields where the things-people-say-happened are mostly determined by political flavor, and basically not coupled to observation”. Etc.
More generally, when applied reflectively, “track an estimate of the physical process which produced the information, and how that process entangles the information with physical reality” is just the fundamental technique of epistemic rationality: what do you think you know and how do you think you know it?