Interesting topic! I'm a huge fan of "out of the box" thinking. But I prefer to apply "out of the box" thinking to the phrase itself by referring to this type of thinking as epiphytic thinking.
The phrase "epiphytic thinking" helps promote/advertise epiphytes. Did you know that the orchid family is the largest plant family? Around 10% of all plants are orchids.... and most orchids are epiphytes.
Epiphytes can help sequester as much carbon as trees do. They also help create a gazillion different niches which has has helped increase animal speciation/biodiversity.
Epiphytes can certainly help save the world. What are boxes good for? Helping you pretend that you're a robot?
Therefore...
epiphytic thinking > "out of the box" thinking
I'll apply some epiphytic thinking to your topic.
Let's say that we have a time machine and we travel back to a hundred years before people discovered that the earth was round. Our mission, which we've chosen to accept, is to try and persuade people that the earth is actually round!
It stands to reason that no two people are going to be equally willing to hear us out. In this sense... perhaps we can say that there's a continuum that ranges from the most close-minded person all the way to the most open-minded person. To help quantify this continuum we'll use a scale from 0 to 10.
The question is...if somebody is a 10 on this scale... does this necessarily mean that they'll believe us that the world is actually round? Just because they'll be really willing to listen to our very different perspective on the shape of the world... does this mean that they'll take our word for it? Not really... because this would imply that our open-mindedness scale was the same thing as a gullibility scale.
So clearly it would help to bring some evidence with us on our mission. Stronger evidence is always better than weaker evidence but let's just say that our evidence is good.
Imagine if we share our good evidence with 100 people who are all a 10 on the open-mindedness scale. What percentage of them are going to change their beliefs accordingly? Of course we can't really know the real answer... but it doesn't seem very likely that 100% of them would exchange their belief in a flat world for a belief in a round world.
From our perspective, we would know that anybody who didn't change their belief accordingly was making a mistake. Why did they make the mistake though? Was it a lack of intelligence? Lack of rationality? Lack of critical thinking skills? Was there some sort of bias involved? Or stubbornness?
Just like no two people are equally open-minded... I don't think that any two people are equally, for lack of a better term... "evidence-minded". Is there a better term? "Rationality" seems close but it doesn't seem quite right to refer to somebody as "irrational" just because our good evidence didn't persuade them that their belief in a flat world was wrong.
What's the point here? Well... at one point everybody was really wrong about the shape of the world. So perhaps it's a pretty good idea for us to fully embrace the possibility that we're all really wrong about the shape of... say... the best government. Because if it's really difficult to appreciate the fact that you might be wrong... then it's going to be really difficult for you to accept any good evidence that proves that you are wrong. Therefore, anybody who's a 10 on the evidence-minded scale will probably really embrace fallibilism.
First post here, and I'm disagreeing with something in the main sequences. Hubris acknowledged, here's what I've been thinking about. It comes from the post "Are your enemies innately evil?":
If I'm misreading this, please correct me, but the way I am reading this is:
1) People do not construct their stories so that they are the villains,
therefore
2) the idea that Al Qaeda is motivated by a hatred of American freedom is false.
Reading the Al Qaeda document released after the attacks called Why We Are Fighting You you find the following:
"Freedom" is of course one of those words. It's easy enough to imagine an SS officer saying indignantly: "Of course we are fighting for freedom! For our people to be free of Jewish domination, free from the contamination of lesser races, free from the sham of democracy..."
If we substitute the symbol with the substance though, what we mean by freedom - "people to be left more or less alone, to follow whichever religion they want or none, to speak their minds, to try to shape society's laws so they serve the people" - then Al Qaeda is absolutely inspired by a hatred of freedom. They wouldn't call it "freedom", mind you, they'd call it "decadence" or "blasphemy" or "shirk" - but the substance is what we call "freedom".
Returning to the syllogism at the top, it seems to be that there is an unstated premise. The conclusion "Al Qaeda cannot possibly hate America for its freedom because everyone sees himself as the hero of his own story" only follows if you assume that What is heroic, what is good, is substantially the same for all humans, for a liberal Westerner and an Islamic fanatic.
(for Americans, by "liberal" here I mean the classical sense that includes just about everyone you are likely to meet, read or vote for. US conservatives say they are defending the American revolution, which was broadly in line with liberal principles - slavery excepted, but since US conservatives don't support that, my point stands).
When you state the premise baldly like that, you can see the problem. There's no contradiction in thinking that Muslim fanatics think of themselves as heroic precisely for being opposed to freedom, because they see their heroism as trying to extend the rule of Allah - Shariah - across the world.
Now to the point - we all know the phrase "thinking outside the box". I submit that if you can recognize the box, you've already opened it. Real bias isn't when you have a point of view you're defending, but when you cannot imagine that another point of view seriously exists.
That phrasing has a bit of negative baggage associated with it, that this is just a matter of pigheaded close-mindedness. Try thinking about it another way. Would you say to someone with dyscalculia "You can't get your head around the basics of calculus? You are just being so close minded!" No, that's obviously nuts. We know that different peoples minds work in different ways, that some people can see things others cannot.
Orwell once wrote about the British intellectuals inability to "get" fascism, in particular in his essay on H.G. Wells. He wrote that the only people who really understood the nature and menace of fascism were either those who had felt the lash on their backs, or those who had a touch of the fascist mindset themselves. I suggest that some people just cannot imagine, cannot really believe, the enormous power of faith, of the idea of serving and fighting and dying for your god and His prophet. It is a kind of thinking that is just alien to many.
Perhaps this is resisted because people think that "Being able to think like a fascist makes you a bit of a fascist". That's not really true in any way that matters - Orwell was one of the greatest anti-fascist writers of his time, and fought against it in Spain.
So - if you can see the box you are in, you can open it, and already have half-opened it. And if you are really in the box, you can't see the box. So, how can you tell if you are in a box that you can't see versus not being in a box?
The best answer I've been able to come up with is not to think of "box or no box" but rather "open or closed box". We all work from a worldview, simply because we need some knowledge to get further knowledge. If you know you come at an issue from a certain angle, you can always check yourself. You're in a box, but boxes can be useful, and you have the option to go get some stuff from outside the box.
The second is to read people in other boxes. I like steelmanning, it's an important intellectual exercise, but it shouldn't preclude finding actual Men of Steel - that is, people passionately committed to another point of view, another box, and taking a look at what they have to say.
Now you might say: "But that's steelmanning!" Not quite. Steelmanning is "the art of addressing the best form of the other person’s argument, even if it’s not the one they presented." That may, in some circumstances, lead you to make the mistake of assuming that what you think is the best argument for a position is the same as what the other guy thinks is the best argument for his position. That's especially important if you are addressing a belief held by a large group of people.
Again, this isn't to run down steelmanning - the practice is sadly limited, and anyone who attempts it has gained a big advantage in figuring out how the world is. It's just a reminder that the steelman you make may not be quite as strong as the steelman that is out to get you.
[EDIT: Link included to the document that I did not know was available online before now]