Your last shortform made it clearer that what you discuss could also be framed as seeking ways of getting the process started, and exploring obstructions.
A lot of this depends on the assumption of ability to direct skepticism internally, otherwise you risk stumbling into the derogatory senses of “having an open mind” (“so open your brains fall out”). Traditional skepticism puts the boundary around your whole person or even community. With a good starting point, this keeps a person relatively sane and lets in incremental improvements. With a bad starting point, it makes them irredeemable. This is a boundary of a memeplex that infests one’s mind, a convergently useful thing for most memeplexes to maintain. Any energy for engagement specific people would have is then spent on defending the boundary, only letting through what’s already permitted by the reigning memeplex. Thus debates between people from different camps are largely farcical, mostly recruitment drives for the audience.
A shorter path to self-improvement naturally turns skepticism inward, debugs your own thoughts that are well past that barrier. Unlike the outer barriers, this is an asymmetric weapon that reflects on the truth or falsity of ideas that are already accepted. But once it’s in place, it becomes much safer to lower the outer barriers, to let other memeplexes open embassies in your own mind. Then the job of skepticism is defending your own island in an archipelago of ideas hosted in your own mind that are all intuitively available to various degrees and allowed to grow in clarity, but often hopelessly contradict each other.
However, this is not a natural outcome of skepticism turning inwards. If the scope of skepticism remains too wide, greedily debugging everything, other islands wither before they gain sufficient clarity to contribute. So there are at least two widespread obstructions to archipelago mind. First, external skepticism that won’t let unapproved ideas in, justified by the damage they’d do in the absence of internal skepticism, with selection promoting memeplexes that end up encouraging such skepticism. Second, internal skepticism that targets the whole mind rather than a single island of your own beliefs, justified by its success in exterminating nonsense.
Your last shortform made it clearer that what you discuss could also be framed as seeking ways of getting the process started, and exploring obstructions.
A lot of this depends on the assumption of ability to direct skepticism internally, otherwise you risk stumbling into the derogatory senses of “having an open mind” (“so open your brains fall out”). Traditional skepticism puts the boundary around your whole person or even community. With a good starting point, this keeps a person relatively sane and lets in incremental improvements. With a bad starting point, it makes them irredeemable. This is a boundary of a memeplex that infests one’s mind, a convergently useful thing for most memeplexes to maintain. Any energy for engagement specific people would have is then spent on defending the boundary, only letting through what’s already permitted by the reigning memeplex. Thus debates between people from different camps are largely farcical, mostly recruitment drives for the audience.
A shorter path to self-improvement naturally turns skepticism inward, debugs your own thoughts that are well past that barrier. Unlike the outer barriers, this is an asymmetric weapon that reflects on the truth or falsity of ideas that are already accepted. But once it’s in place, it becomes much safer to lower the outer barriers, to let other memeplexes open embassies in your own mind. Then the job of skepticism is defending your own island in an archipelago of ideas hosted in your own mind that are all intuitively available to various degrees and allowed to grow in clarity, but often hopelessly contradict each other.
However, this is not a natural outcome of skepticism turning inwards. If the scope of skepticism remains too wide, greedily debugging everything, other islands wither before they gain sufficient clarity to contribute. So there are at least two widespread obstructions to archipelago mind. First, external skepticism that won’t let unapproved ideas in, justified by the damage they’d do in the absence of internal skepticism, with selection promoting memeplexes that end up encouraging such skepticism. Second, internal skepticism that targets the whole mind rather than a single island of your own beliefs, justified by its success in exterminating nonsense.