Okay, let's see.

I've noticed a mental phenomenon I call crystallization. I'm sure other people have noticed it, and they might even have a similar name for it. It's basically where you encounter a new thought or idea that takes a bunch of vague, half-formed thoughts you had floating around in the back of your head, and crystallizes them - condenses them into one overarching, explicit idea. The explicitness is very important - pre-crystallized thoughts are not explicit. Crystallization can be almost an insidious process, in a way, in that you can wind up holding new ideas or beliefs, that you thought you held all along - you don't even notice yourself learning. In that sense it's related to hindsight bias - things seem obvious after you know them.

Random example: I always thought libertarianism held some appeal to me, but I couldn't put my finger on what exactly. Then I read Yvain's non-libertarian FAQ and came upon the following sentence:

"Unlike the mix-and-match philosophies of the Democratic and Republican parties, libertarianism is coherent and sometimes even derived from first principles."

Aha! That's it exactly. What attracted me to libertarianism was its simplicity and self-consistency. Makes sense. After reading that sentence it seems obvious. But was it obvious beforehand? Probably not - I had had vague, not-spelled-out thoughts along those lines, but I had never put it into words before. There exists a very clear difference between my thinking before and after reading that sentence, that I might not have even noticed if I didn't have this notion of crystallization.

I post this hoping to crystallize the idea of crystallization itself for people. I think a lot of people have - of course - vague, half-formed notions that something like this is true, but they haven't spelled it out explicitly - and I think explicitness in this case is very important.