A lot of people probably already know that, it’s a familiar “deep wisdom”, but anyway: you can use this not-changing of your mind to help you with seemingly complicated decisions that you ponder over for days. Simply assign the possible answers and flip a coin (or roll a dice, if you need more than 2). It doesn’t matter what the result is, but depending on wether it matches your already-made decision you will either immediately reject the coin’s “answer” or not. That tells you what your first decision was, unclouded by any attempts to justify the other option(s).
Now, if you’ve trained your intuition (aka have the right set of Cached Thoughts), that answer will be the correct or better one. Or, as has happened to me more than once, you realize that both alternatives are actually wrong and your mind already came up with a better solution.
Me too, but I fear I may be primed to believing Eliezer as his previous posts contained stuff that I heard about before, granting him some advantage. Or it may be Authority...
Anyway: I find it interesting that a german newspaper mostly known for being the lowest form of journalism imaginable (but still highest-grossing) uses a similar technique in their “articles”: they print more or less randomly chosen fragments in bold or italics. Could using confusing fonts really be enough to get people to “believe everything”?
Something else I noticed: all highlighted phrases in this article are negative. This may have primed against the postive effects here. Somebody should test this.