"If a man heareth me and believeth not, I shall not judge him." or words to that effect.
I think it's somewhere around John 12, or is that Luke 12?, quoting Jesus.
Sorry, it's been a while since I last checked.
Also, "what we don't know that we don't know"
Some people practice "Radical Honesty" which seems much like that. Seems to me you'd need to start young, before you've got too many skeletons in the closet, before you've got too much to lose, and whilst you have time to recover. Probably also need an honesty-proof career.
As for sounding crazy, I'm already crazy and readily admit it.
Who are you quoting?
I seem to recall having read/heard this before.
Mind you, it depends on the reliability of it working. If something has a (real) 90% chance of making the problem twice as bad, but just happens to fix it, then it's still stupid.
I think the potential usefulness is to shock some people out of their mental ataxia and into prioritizing their wishes in order to focus their will.
It might be more accurate to substitute "rules" for "procedures".
Unfortunately in Medicine at least, there seems to be a substantial degree of sloppiness in applying the rules, particularly in the use of metastudies.
Define "effectiveness as a person" - in many cases the bias leading to the pre-written conclusion has some form of survival value (e.g. social survival). Due partly to childhood issues resulting in a period of complete? rejection of the value of emotions, I have an unusually high resistance to intellectual bias, yet on a number of measures of "effectiveness as a person" I do not seem to be measuring up well yet (on some others I seem to be doing okay).
Also, as I mentioned in my reply to the first comment, real world algorithms are often an amalgam of the two approaches, so it is not so much which algorithm as what weighting the approaches get. In most (if not all) people this weighting changes with the subject, not just with the person's general level of rationality/intellectual honesty.
As it is almost impossible to detect and neutralize all of one's biases and assumptions, and dangerous to attempt "counter-bias", arriving at a result known to be truly unbiased is rare. NOTE: Playing "Devil's Advocate" sensibly is not "counter-bias" and in a reasonable entity will help to reveal and neutralize bias.
"What would count as evidence about whether the author wrote the conclusion down first or at the end of his analysis?":
Past history of accuracy/trustworthiness;
Evidence of a lack of incentive for bias;
Spot check results for sampling bias.
The last may be unreliable if a) you're the author, or b) your spot check evidence source may be biased, e.g. by a generally accepted biased paradigm.
In the real world this is complicated by the fact that the bottom line may have only been "pencilled in", biased the argument, then been adjusted as a result of the argument - e.g.
"Pencilled in" bottom line is 65;
Unbiased bottom line would be 45;
Adjusted bottom line is 55; - neither correct, nor as incorrect as the original "pencilled in" value.
This "weak bias" algorithm can be recursive, leading eventually (sometimes over many years) to virtual elimination of the original bias, as often happens in scientific and philosophical discourse.
And some people still believe that people choose to be homosexual.
If that were so, why would teenagers commit suicide instead of choosing to be heterosexual.
To me, a gay man is just less competition, and since lots of women are not interested in me anyway, what difference does it make if some of them are gay?