In terms of debate, the following have always been the most helpful to me in ensuring that I'm not believing things only because I want them to be true. I've ordered them from easiest to hardest to implement.
In discussions, presume the kinds of conditions that are the least convenient for your argument.
Even if you've been fairly mind-killed, it's pretty easy to notice when someone else raises a difficulty you haven't thought of.
Encourage "Why do I think that" monologues. You elaborate on a thing you currently believe to be true by specifying the reasons you believe it, the reasons you believe the reasons, etc and trying to dig out the whole epistemological structure
This method also has the benefit of forcing you to focus on improving the truth-quality of beliefs rather than winning the argument.
Before you stake your argument on a point, ask yourself in advance what you would say if that point were decisively refuted. If you wouldn't actually change your mind, search for a point that you find more convincing.
This is incredibly hard to implement, because if you didn't have the core belief, the supporting beliefs would never seem important.
The wiki entry for Epistemic Hygiene defines the term as:
Epistemic hygiene consists of practices meant to allow accurate beliefs to spread within a community and keep less accurate or biased beliefs contained. The practices are meant to serve an analogous purpose to normal hygiene and sanitation in containing disease.
The term was coined in Steve Rayhawk's and Anna Salamon's post "The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice", and there have been several mentions of it around the site. But what, exactly, might good epistemic hygiene norms be?
I'm especially interested in this question in the context of meetup groups. In Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter, Cosmos writes:
Epistemic privilege and meme-sharing: The most powerful aspect of a group of rationalists is that you have an entire class of people whose reasoning you trust. Division of labor arises naturally as each member has different interests, they all pursue a variety of skills and areas of expertise, which they can then bring back to the group. Even the lowest-level rationalists in the group can rapidly upgrade themselves by adopting winning heuristics from other group members. I cannot overstate the power of epistemic privilege. We have rapidly spread knowledge about metabolism, exercise, neuroscience, meditation, hypnosis, several systems of therapy... and don't forget the Dark Arts.
This would imply that one way that a meetup group (or for that matter, any social group) could get really successful would be by adopting great epistemic hygiene norms. But unless everyone present has read most of the Sequences - which gets increasingly unlikely the more the group grows - even most LW meetups probably won't just spontaneously enforce such norms. Wouldn't it be great if there were an existing list of such norms, that each group could look through and then decide which ones they'd like to adopt?
Here are some possible epistemic hygiene norms that I could find / come up with:
And of course, there's a long list of norms that basically amount to "don't be guilty of bias X", e.g. "avoid unnecessarily detailed stories about the future", "avoid fake explanations", "don't treat arguments as soldiers", etc.
Which of these norms do you consider the most valuable? Which seem questionable? Do you have any norms of your own to propose?