In some companies I've worked for, we've found ways of running meetings that encouraged contributing information that is considered an attack in many other companies. The particular context was code reviews, but we did them often enough that the same attitude could be seen in other design discussions. The attitude we taught the code's presenter to have was appreciation for the comments, suggestions, and actual bugs found. The catechism we used to close code reviews was that someone would ask the presenter whether the meeting had been valuable, and the appropriate response was always "yes". The presenter could find different things to say about the value contributed by the attendees, but that catechism reinforces the point of view that improving the code is worth the time spent by the reviewers. As people get better at reviewing and being reviewed in the proper spirit, everyone who worked with us seemed to learn that finding fault with the code and explaining the problem clearly helped the company produce better products.

Once the engineers had learned how to provide constructive criticism, and others in the company learned to understand the spirit in which it was intended, it was easier to present disagreement on other subjects without needing to disagree at the end.

A few of you touched on the point I got out of this, but no one explained it very well. In the first koan, Ougi says two things. The clearer one is tangential to rationality, but important for self-doubting cultists. "You are like a swordsman who keeps glancing away to see if anyone might be laughing at him".

The more important point was that the teachings are valuable if they are useful. (This is applicable to the sword fighter because allowing yourself to be distracted is an immediate danger.)

The importance of the parable about hammers doesn't relate to prices, but to usefulness. "Use the hammer to drive nails" in a discussion about rationality is metaphoric for using the techniques to make better decisions. If Ougi's teachings help you make better decisions in your life, then they are valuable. If they merely bind you more tightly to Ougi, then you are a cultist.

Bouzo didn't learn anything that helped him make decisions, he was merely cowed into following Ougi more closely. Ni no Tachi learned to "concentrate on a real-world question", so "the worth ... of his understanding [became] apparent."

Ni no Tachi figured out how to use the hammer, but Bouzo only sold them without understanding their value.

W. W. Bartley's "The Retreat to Commitment" is the best book on epistemology, bar none, in my opinion. He fixes a small bug in Popper's Critical Rationalism, to suggest that even the epistemic approach should be subject to criticism, and produces Pan-Critical Rationalism (hence my blog's title: pancrit.org). He then proceeds to attack PCR from every direction he can think of.

Extreme Bayesianism may be a more modern incarnation of the approach, but the history of rationalism and the description of how to evaluate your rationality is truly valuable, and hasn't been replicated in the current context.

I'm not sure the phrase "closed access" is a fair epithet to use against mainstream scientific journals. Even if they charge $20,000/year, most scientists have access to them via their institutional library, and there aren't many scientists who wouldn't send you a copy of their article if you asked for it. In many fields, the articles are available on the web after they appear in the journals. And if none of those apply to a particular article, you can probably visit a university library and read it there.

I'm not trying to deny that open access would be better, but it's not as if the scientific journals are trying to maintain a secretive cabal; they're doing a good job of spreading information among the involved professionals. The fact that there are more people interested these days means that open access would be more valuable than before.

It's still science, even if it's expensive to get access to the academy.

"I should have paid more attention to that sensation of still feels a little forced."

The force that you would have had to counter was the impetus to be polite. In order to boldly follow your models, you would have had to tell the person on the other end of the chat that you didn't believe his friend. You could have less boldly held your tongue, but that wouldn't have satisfied your drive to understand what was going on. Perhaps a compromise action would have been to point out the unlikelihood, (which you did: "they'd have hauled him off if there was the tiniest chance of serious trouble"), and ask for a report on the eventual outcome.

Given the constraints of politeness, I don't know how you can do better. If you were talking to people who knew you better, and understood your viewpoint on rationality, you might expect to be forgiven for giving your bald assessment of the unlikeliness of the report.

On #3, I think it's more relevant to point out that many adults believe that God can make it alright to kill someone. What children believe about God and theft is a pale watered-down imitation of this.