This is more important in cases where you care about being right eventually, less important in cases where it pretty much doesn't matter if you're acting based on mistaken beliefs.

Does that mean Main is no longer deprecated?

Thanks! I came up with it (during a conversation with the Arbital team, so some credit's due to them), post forthcoming to explain it.

I'm not sure exactly what you meant, so not ultimately sure whether I disagree, but I at least felt uncomfortable with this claim.

I think it's because:

• Your framing pushes towards holding beliefs rather than credences in the sense used here.
• I think it's generally inappropriate to hold beliefs about the type of things that are important and you're likely to turn out to be wrong on. (Of course for boundedly rational agents it's acceptable to hold beliefs about some things as a time/attention-saving matter.)
• It's normally right to update credences gradually as more evidence comes in. There isn't so much an "I was wrong" moment.

On the other hand I do support generating explicit hypotheses, and articulating concrete models.

I think I've gotten a lot out of trying to make my confusions public, because a lot of the time when I'm confused the source is also confused, and if not then I get my confusion resolved quickly instead of slowly.

I typically hesitate before recommending this to other people, because I don't know what the cost/benefit ratio looks like at difficult base rates of confusion. If you actually are wrong nine times out of ten, what does being open about this look like?

There is a trade-off because people (at least those who are not spherical cows in vacuum) tend to stick to initial positions. So if you picked a model/belief early, you might find abandoning it difficult. Plus there is the whole feedback loop where having an existing belief will affect which evidence you choose to see.

So it's not the case of "the more the better", declaring a flimsily-supported position has its costs which have to be taken into account. In practice I tend to delay articulating my models until I need to -- there is no point in formulating a position when it will not affect anything.

One problem with this is that we are not perfectly rational beings.

If you don't think you have enough evidence yet to form an opinion on something, it may be better to hold off and not form an opinion yet. Because once you form an opinion, it will inherently bias the way you precieve new information you get, and even the most rational of us tend to be biased towards wanting to think that our current opinion is already right.

One correlary is that even when you don't have enough evidence to form an opinion, you can create and start to test a hypothesis for yourself without actually deciding (even in secret) that it is "your opinion". That way you can get the advantages you are talking about without precomittimg yourself to something that might bias you.

I feel like this goes hand in hand with epistemic humility (often showcased by Yvain) that I try to emulate. If you expose the inner wiring of your argument, including where you're uncertain, and literally invite people to shoot holes in it, you're going to learn a lot faster.

You could argue that Slate Star Codex is one big exercise in "Here are some thoughts I'm mildly/moderately/completely sure about, tell me what's wrong with them and I'll actually pay attention to your feedback."

Another thing you can do is, once you've secretly articulated your bold claims, and in that space figured out which you believe and to what extent, publicly express your more endorsed, moderated judgment. It's often important to have some workspace where you make bold but dubious claim X, in order seriously consider it as a hypothesis and explore what the evidence is and what it predicts. But this can help you figure out what qualifiers to add, or at least be able to confidently say something like, "I'm not sure this is right, but if it's wrong, I have no idea how or in what direction."

One thing I dislike about public debates (outside of LW) is when I make a statement other people disagree with, and some of them keep bringing it up repeatedly later, in completely unrelated topics. My most extreme experience of this: on some website I once criticized a politician for doing something controversial, and one of his fans kept stalking me for a few months, and whenever I posted an unrelated article, he always posted a comment saying "hey, you are the guy who said that the politician X did a bad thing, but you are completely wrong!". (And I was like: "dude, how exactly is this relevant to my Gimp tutorial? can't we just keep the discussion on-topic?". Unfortunately, there was no way for me to remove comments, and the admins refused to classify this as a spam.)

Similarly, since I've posted a few LW links on Facebook, some people start to prefix their disagreements with me by: "If you call yourself a rationalist, you shouldn't believe X." (They refuse my offers to make bets about X, though. They just believe that it is inappropriate for a rational person to disagree with them. And no, I don't call myself a rationalist in such situations.)

So it feels like if you try to keep your identity small, you better register a separate nick for each article you post. Which of course would be too inconvenient. (Or maybe a nick per topic. Or rather, per opinion.)

I've got pushback at LW for a similar idea :-/

I would argue this claim understates the problem. In my experience, claims can be made at one of two levels, either strongly held or weakly held. One cannot perfectly phrase a claim such that nobody confuses one for the other, and other people tend to ignore weakly held claims.

It would be really useful to be able to say "I am moderately confident that the Purple party's policy will lead to Bad Things" and get feedback that raises or lowers my confidence in that claim. Most responses unfortunately will assume that I was more confident than I actually was. (This issue might be summarized as "Screwtape needs to spend less time on facebook.")

Something that might help lower this inhibition is an ability to retract or update on claims usefully. Technically, a blog lets you make a statement and then later edit the post or post an update, but you can't rely on people rereading the post or following your blog to see updates. This might be solved socially (a norm of checking someone still believes a claim before responding to that claim or propagating what they said?) or with technology (rss feeds and edit buttons on posts) but will probably need to be solved with a combination of the two.

afraid of social or cultural backlash of being wrong

Fear of backlash is not a function of being wrong, but of being seen to be wrong.

I have a "secret blog" that I share with only a handful of friends. It is extremely psychologically useful to have a place where I can post stupid, half-formed thoughts. It gets the thoughts out of my head, allows me to either advance them or abandon them. Doing that "in public" would merely waste everyone's time.

I see this as being related to the creative phenomenon of "churning" and the practice of writing "morning pages". You do benefit from having a space to just vomit thoughts without restraint or filters so you can pin them down and move on. You won't usually want those thoughts to be publicly attached to your name.