Flinch towards your belief's most painful weaknesses

You need to do this spontaneously, as a matter of course. That skill takes some built-up confidence/trust in the fact that your world won't shatter. This can be built-up from

• repeated experience of genuinely attacking your own beliefs and seeing it only result in good things, repeated experience that changing your beliefs does not end the world, indeed on the contrary, you were glad every time you did.
• enough experience learning from mistakes that you instinctively know that if you can uncover that you've been making a mistake, a prize awaits you in terms of a great leap ahead.

Normally, we instinctually avoid looking, as if avoiding a red-hot burner: www.greaterwrong.com/posts/dHQkDNMhj692ayx78/avoiding-your-belief-s-real-weak-points?hide-nav-bars=true. It is instinct to only to attack your own beliefs on points you subconsciously identify as safe targets – where some part of you suspects you'll be able to defend the point. Automatically looking for the easiest target for the feel-good of rehearsing your supportive evidence, not automatically looking for the hardest target out of a desire to reveal and destroy false beliefs as if sweeping your body for ticks. Those disgusting ticks.

The core motivation there is different: it is not just that you want to "cover your bases" and feel that you've "done your dues" and done the act of open-minded questioning, as if checking off a box on a list of ritual steps that you're supposed to do to pay obeisance to rationalist propriety. You may even share a desire with the genuinely curious, the desire to bring your beliefs and reality into sync. But this won't work. What's needed is the bone-deep awareness, on top of that natural desire, that if they're out of sync, there is only one way to bring them into sync, and that is by being wrong. Reality is a fixed point, like a mountain; you climb it, it never was an option to make it come to you. The core motivation must be that you want to know what's true, more than that you want your beliefs to be shown true.

This instinctive flinch towards the pain may more likely happen if you put yourself in a certain frame of mind – so, when analyzing a belief of yours or discussing with someone what is true in some topic, recite to yourself some Hallowed phrases like Gendlin's "If the sky is blue, I desire to believe the sky is blue. If the sky is green, I desire to believe the sky is green."

What links here

• Rationality techniques
• Confirmation bias
• Avoiding Your Belief's Real Weak Points