Cached Thoughts are ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that a person has formed on some past occasion, and hasn't re-evaluated since then. The name references the concept of a cache in computing: a component storing data that has been calculated or retrieved once, so that it is quickly available without needing to be recalculated or re-retrieved.
See also: Groupthink, Information Cascades, Status quo bias, Semantic Stopsign, Separate Magisteria, Rationalist Taboo
Cached thoughts can be useful in saving computational resources at the cost of some memory load, and also at the risk of maintaining a belief long past the point when evidence should force an update. In particular, cached thoughts can result in a lack of creative approaches to problem-solving, as cached solutions may interfere with the formation of novel ones. What is generally called common sense is more or less a collection of cached thoughts....