Don't punish yourself or others for taking time to think before responding.
If you were a kid in school who was rewarded for being quick with the answers, taking time and letting others take time is a habit that takes some training.
To express it at more length:
Don't press yourself or others to have immediate perfect articulations of what they know.
If people are only respected if they speak immediately, the only thoughts that will be spoken are cached thoughts.
Be comfortable saying things like "I think I shouldn't agree or disagree right away," or "I'll need to take some time to think through what my real opinion is on that point," or "I didn't quite say what I really meant earlier." Support others who say those things.
Believe that the value of a person's thoughts is not always the same as their speed of response.
Create a favorable environment for both you and others to figure out what they really think, notice, and remember, as opposed to what they're able to articulate in the heat of a single conversation.
This is a special case of "leave a line of retreat."
No, it is not. Leaving a line of retreat is about imagining possible worlds where one of your beliefs is false.
The wiki entry for Epistemic Hygiene defines the term as:
Epistemic hygiene consists of practices meant to allow accurate beliefs to spread within a community and keep less accurate or biased beliefs contained. The practices are meant to serve an analogous purpose to normal hygiene and sanitation in containing disease.
The term was coined in Steve Rayhawk's and Anna Salamon's post "The ethic of hand-washing and community epistemic practice", and there have been several mentions of it around the site. But what, exactly, might good epistemic hygiene norms be?
I'm especially interested in this question in the context of meetup groups. In Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter, Cosmos writes:
Epistemic privilege and meme-sharing: The most powerful aspect of a group of rationalists is that you have an entire class of people whose reasoning you trust. Division of labor arises naturally as each member has different interests, they all pursue a variety of skills and areas of expertise, which they can then bring back to the group. Even the lowest-level rationalists in the group can rapidly upgrade themselves by adopting winning heuristics from other group members. I cannot overstate the power of epistemic privilege. We have rapidly spread knowledge about metabolism, exercise, neuroscience, meditation, hypnosis, several systems of therapy... and don't forget the Dark Arts.
This would imply that one way that a meetup group (or for that matter, any social group) could get really successful would be by adopting great epistemic hygiene norms. But unless everyone present has read most of the Sequences - which gets increasingly unlikely the more the group grows - even most LW meetups probably won't just spontaneously enforce such norms. Wouldn't it be great if there were an existing list of such norms, that each group could look through and then decide which ones they'd like to adopt?
Here are some possible epistemic hygiene norms that I could find / come up with:
And of course, there's a long list of norms that basically amount to "don't be guilty of bias X", e.g. "avoid unnecessarily detailed stories about the future", "avoid fake explanations", "don't treat arguments as soldiers", etc.
Which of these norms do you consider the most valuable? Which seem questionable? Do you have any norms of your own to propose?