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JGWeissman comments on SotW: Avoid Motivated Cognition - Less Wrong
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The obvious response to Lucy is "Is buying and eating that whole choclate cake really the best way to help the sugar industry? How does it compare to other strategies, like directly giving them money?"
The generalization is that when you say you are taking action A in pursuit of goal G, ask what other actions might be more effective at achieving G.
Yeah.
I also find that getting into the habit of imagining my response to the putative cause turning out not to be true can help.
That is, suppose I suddenly discover that the sugar industry is actually doing really well, but the broccoli industry is in deep financial trouble. Does my decision about the cake change in response? If not, it's likely that putative cause isn't actually causal.
This is also a good response, though outside the pattern I described. It's generalization seems to be that when you are taking an action to help some group of people, ask would you take actions that similarly help some other group of people. So it is a somewhat narrower technique, applying when the goal is helping some group of people. Perhaps you could generalize it further.
(nods) I would say, rather, that the generalization is that when I believe I'm taking A in response to condition C, ask whether my desire to do A would vary if C were radically altered. If changes in C don't correspond to changes in A, it's likely that A is not actually a response to C.