Re. the story of the hot/cool plate that was then rotated (www.greaterwrong.com/posts/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT/fake-explanations)

The fix is not to end your faith in your understanding of sequences of events forever… but at least you must be able to come up with out-of-box explanations for strange happenings, up to and including that everything you experienced was a hallucination – actually, it's not about creativity itself (easy), but the habit to activate your creativity as soon as you sense that you can find something that fits reality better than the fait accompli, even if you have to reach far into the improbable. Some disinclination to take what you seem to have observed as something that did happen.

Using a different example, if you never suspected that your science teacher moonlights as a magician, you'd naturally assign a low probability to the hypothesis that she uses sleight of hand to fool you about something. That's fine. The problem is when you don't even think of this hypothesis. You must spot at least the fact that sleight of hand would be one of the easiest ways to cause your current observations, when otherwise your physics model struggles to explain it at anywhere near gears-level.

Inspired by Cicero's cui bono, one way to do it: Zoom out, assume someone meant for you to see this odd result, ask what you would have done to make it happen.

Or: Posed with the challenge to explain the chilly metal plate, ask what you would have done if you right now decided to go into another room with another metal plate and another fire to reproduce the result. Looks like a variant of my trick to find out how I messed up in a relationship: asking "what would I have done different if I re-started the day?" (Cognitive reframings).

Or it's a variant of considering the counterfactual (Reversal test), although here, I see no "traditional" counterfactual – the observation must be taken as given, it makes little sense to consider "what if I had seen a different observation?" (although that might be useful for bug-checking your proposed explanation), but instead you consider the alternative world one where a truth-fairy tells you that some of the facts in your hand are not facts (you've been fed a lie or accidental lie, or someone misdirected your attention or omitted something, or you've misinterpreted something). Having been told this by the fairy, what would be your first thought?

Another way to frame this question: How to feel shocked enough? Practice that to stop the habit of accepting the fait accompli.

*Hindsight devalues science, but if it was just that we don't feel as "grateful" to science as we could, that would be a minor problem. Hindsight bias prevents us from noticing that the new scientific finding DOES NOT fit what we would have expected, and so we cannot debug why our world-model would have guessed differently.

This debugging is desirable, but pause here for a digression. Assume now that our priors were at actually 1:1 or better in favour of observing the finding. Even then (or maybe especially then), we're never as shocked as we could be (hindsight devalues science: "of course students perform better after a morning walk, all these researchers proving what we already knew, what a waste of dollars…"). Being simply told a fact, we need to put in conscious effort to be shocked enough.

It would be better if everyone always led with a question to let you guess first which way the fact will go, and only then gave you the fact (Ask people to guess before telling them a fact).

My idea to feel shocked enough: REVERSE ALL NEW FACTS.

(Looks like yet another type of Reversal test!)

It goes something like this… you reverse it and ask if you would've bought this with the same credulity, or if it would've been surprising. If surprising, that's good.

Sometimes there is no direct reverse as there were many possible answers. But you go back and ask what you would've guessed. (Maybe that's the proper name of the technique, not reversing the fact, but "what would've you guessed?")

It's really hard to know what you would've guessed, and that's why it's so much better to make a guess before hearing the fact.

Apply the technique to new science "findings" as a training step only – findings are easy to be skeptical of, thus not important. Where you most need your art as a rationalist is where it's most difficult. The goal is to reverse things that never occur to you as targets of doubt.

It takes effort to disbelieve, so probably good to have the habit of trying to disprove what you hear, and that starts with checking what you would've guessed. At least, when people tell you something new, you can ask "is that so?" to promote to consciousness the fact that you just heard and therefore believed something. Similar to the TAP action "I notice that I'm confused", but here the function to you is simply "I notice that I just received unverified data".

For bonus points, say "Is that so? I wouldn't have guessed that" or "Is that so? I would've guessed X instead."

I'd like to run this mental operation often so it's effortless. It actually creates interesting daydreams too: when a coworker says his car broke down, you stop and wonder: "huh. I wonder if I could've expected that" and start looking back for signs. Productive daydreams that refine your world-model.

You can use knit counters to train Noticing things. But a tip: AVOID the digital counters and pick mechanical!

The problem: Digital counters shut off after a while, so you need to press the button twice: once to turn it on, then once to increment the number. After that, if you press the button twice, you'll actually increment twice if it hasn't shut off yet. The result is you always have to check if it's on or not. Terrible user experience.

Another disqualifier: at least with the most common types on Amazon, you will hit the button by accident throughout the day.

On the other hand, many mechanical counters are chunky. We need one that's both mechanical and compact. I've seen only one sort fulfilling these criteria, the "pendant style", the sort Agenty Duck linked: www.amazon.com/Clover-Knitting-Stitch-Counter-Kacha-Kacha/dp/B000WUXO4W

DIY finger counter: get a ring from a flea market (any ring), ensuring it fits your finger, and draw numbers on it 0–9 with permanent marker. So then you count by just spinning the ring a little.

If you want two-digit numbers, you can use two rings, or just track in your head how many times you rolled the 9 over to 0.

If it's hard to draw the numbers without smudging, try drawing Roman numerals.

Because "a witch did it" or "Thor did it" takes not many English syllables to say, it seems a short explanation. But it is not short to Occam's Razor. In terms of Kolmogorov complexity (which forms part of the formalization of Occam's Razor called Minimum Message Length), "witch" is a label packing some extraordinary assertions, and the word "it" also packs a lot of information. A verbally longer explanation that does not use such dense labels can be much simpler as Occam's Razor judges it.

• witches, God, Nature … when involved in an explanation, these entities are frequently treated as ontologically basic mental entities, creating a false sense of simplicity