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Anatoly_Vorobey comments on You're Calling *Who* A Cult Leader? - Less Wrong
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I don't know if that ever happened, and I didn't mean to imply he had been. Suppose someone tells you that you've been acting like a cult leader. Even if you don't agree with the claim, you've just obtained a convenient meta-explanation of why people disagree with you: they're consciously standing up to the cult that isn't there; they're being extra contrarian on purpose to affirm their cherished independence. What I was trying to say is that it's generally dangerous to adopt this meta-explanation; you're better off refusing to employ it altogether or at least guard its use with very stringent empirical criteria.
I wish I could agree with that, but you can't actually refuse to employ explanations. You might be able to refuse to talk about it, but you don't get a choice of which of several causal explanations gets to be true.
You can try to correct for the self-serving temptation to overapply a certain explanation.
Why not? Sometimes I manage to refuse to employ as many as five explanations before breakfast.
You can't pretend that the explanation doesn't exist if it occurred to you. But you certainly can refuse to act upon it, not just talk about it. Which among competing explanations for human behavior is true is almost never certain; it's perfectly possible to bias yourself against one common explanation and by doing so avoid the more harmful, and very probable, outcome of oversubscribing to it.