When I first read this, I didn’t take it to mean that it’s easier to think of something if you narrow your focus. Instead, I took from it the lesson that in order to actually think about something, you should prepare your mind by temporarily deleting/quarantining everything that other people have said about that thing. When you’re thinking about what other people have said about a thing, you’re not thinking about the thing itself.
Of course, testimonial evidence is very useful and shouldn’t be dismissed, but I found this piece enlightening because it pointed out the not-intuitively-obvious difference between thinking about testimonial evidence and thinking about the thing itself.
Reading it for a second time, I understand that this piece can also teach the virtue of narrowing your focus to find more to say about something. For example, I could think that by saying “I survived the teletransportation” I would have proclaimed an irreducible truth, while, really, there’s so much more to say about the event if I use concepts with a higher resolution.
Great book, thanks. : )
I found some broken links you may want to fix:
Broken link on p. 47 with text “contra-causal free will”: http://www.naturalism.org/freewill.htm
Broken link on p. 66 with text “somebody else shows where the holes are”: http://singularityu.org/files/SaME.pdf
Broken link on p. 75 with text “This article”: http://lukemuehlhauser.com/SaveTheWorld.html
I didn’t do an exhaustive check of all links, I only noted down the ones I happened to find while clicking on the links I wanted to click.