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CarlShulman comments on The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice - Less Wrong
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Norms to protect against consistency and commitment pressures would be very valuable. One possible mechanism would be to make public 'Red Team' analyses: designate a forum where you will present the strongest case you can against one of your favored ideas, along these lines:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/introducing-ram.html
This could be improved with rewards for success, which the speaker could provide herself using a mechanism like http://www.stickk.com/
With respect to religion, here's some support for the vertical versus horizontal spread idea:
Catholicism-celibate priests, early spread by evangelization. Buddhism-celibate monks, early spread by evangelization. Islam-polygamy for believers, early spread by evangelization and violence, with capture of women for followers. Judaism-priests and rabbis marry, tribal religion Hinduism-contains vast diversity, but religious leaders have generally married, generally the religion is inherited and does not seek converts
Carl, that sounds like it could be really useful for increasing the rate of alternate idea-generation and of idea-shift.
I am concerned that "taking sides", even self-consciously taking the "opposite" side, might lead to polarization and emotional attachment to factual beliefs.
However, I agree that the idea of red-teaming is interesting and should be tried, as part of an effort to develop some rationalist community best practices.
Yes this is a good point, one that Hopefully Anonymous correctly raises frequently. Rather, one should defend a point of view one rejects or has not considered, not specifically the reversal of one's current view.