Thanks, pjeby, I can see how it might be confusing what I am advocating. I've edited the sentence you quote to show that it is a view I am arguing against, and which seems implicit in an approach focused on debiasing.

In effect, learning what something is NOT only negligibly decreases the search space, despite it still being "less wrong".

Yes, this is exactly the point I was making.

Btw, I suspect you were downvoted because it's hard to tell exactly what position you're putting forth -- some segments, like the one I quoted, seem to be in favor of seeking less-wrongness, and others seem to go the other way.

Rather than trying to explain my previous post, I think I'll try to summarize my view from scratch.

The project of "less wrong" seem to be more about how to avoid cognitive and epistemological errors, than about how to achieve cognitive and epistemological successes.

Now, in a sense, both an error and a success are "wrong," because even what seems like a success is unlikely to be completely true. Take, for instance, the success of Newton's physics, even though it was later corrected by Einstein's physics.

Yet I think that even though Newton's physics is "less wrong" than classical mechanics, I think this is a trivial sense which might mislead us. Cognitively focusing on being "less wrong" without sufficiently developed criteria for how we should formulate or recognize reasonable beliefs will lead to underconfidence, stifled creativity, missed opportunities, and eventually radical skepticism as a reductio ad absurdam. Darwin figured out his theory of evolution by studying nature, not (merely) by studying the biases of creationists or other biologists.

Being "less wrong" is a trivially correct description of what occurs in rationality, but I argue that focusing on being "less wrong" is not a complete way to actually practice rationality from the inside, at least, not a rationality that hopes to discover any novel or important things.

Of course, nobody in Overcoming Bias or LessWrong actually thinks that debiasing is sufficient for rationality. Nevertheless, for some reason or another, there is an imbalance of material focusing on avoiding failure modes, and less on seeking success modes.