And it is, in the second place, an attitude of trying to be defensible rather than accurate, the attitude of someone who wants to be allowed to retain the beliefs they have, and not the attitude of someone who is honestly curious and trying to figure out which possible world they live in, by whatever signs are available.
Defensibility and wanting-to-retain-beliefs both seem likely, but seem to me to be different things. Also, a third thing (or perhaps a variant of wanting-to-retain-beliefs) that I think is often involved is wanting-not-to-be-fooled: someone believing that, unconstrained by empirical evidence, a seemingly plausible argument can be constructed for anything, so they’d better not even start to consider any argument for a contrarian position (especially one that favors unusual actions) lest they be exploited either by deliberate trickery or by a parasitic meme.
Defensibility and wanting-to-retain-beliefs both seem likely, but seem to me to be different things. Also, a third thing (or perhaps a variant of wanting-to-retain-beliefs) that I think is often involved is wanting-not-to-be-fooled: someone believing that, unconstrained by empirical evidence, a seemingly plausible argument can be constructed for anything, so they’d better not even start to consider any argument for a contrarian position (especially one that favors unusual actions) lest they be exploited either by deliberate trickery or by a parasitic meme.