I wonder how you might teach this. What are the low level strategies you might use to make yourself more likely to want to do this? Perhaps imagining someone who already knows the correct answer looking keeping track of your progress might make you embarrassed to take any longer than necessary.
How to teach it to students? Cultivate a learning environment in which making mistakes and then correcting yourself is clearly better than not trying.
Today's post, The Importance of Saying "Oops", was originally published on 05 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
When your theory is proved wrong, just scream "OOPS!" and admit your mistake fully. Don't just admit local errors. Don't try to protect your pride by conceding the absolute minimal patch of ground. Making small concessions means that you will make only small improvements. It is far better to make big improvements quickly. This is a lesson of Bayescraft that Traditional Rationality fails to teach.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, in which we're going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order, so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.