When you surround the enemy
Always allow them an escape route.
They must see that there is
An alternative to death.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Don’t raise the pressure, lower the wall.
—Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr

I recently happened into a conversation with a nonrationalist who had somehow wandered into a local rationalists’ gathering. She had just declared (a) her belief in souls and (b) that she didn’t believe in cryonics because she believed the soul wouldn’t stay with the frozen body. I asked, “But how do you know that?”

From the confusion that flashed on her face, it was pretty clear that this question had never occurred to her. I don’t say this in a bad way—she seemed like a nice person without any applied rationality training, just like most of the rest of the human species.

Most of the ensuing conversation was on items already covered on Overcoming Bias—if you’re really curious about something, you probably can figure out a good way to test it, try to attain accurate beliefs first and then let your emotions flow from that, that sort of thing. But the conversation reminded me of one notion I haven’t covered here yet:

“Make sure,” I suggested to her, “that you visualize what the world would be like if there are no souls, and what you would do about that. Don’t think about all the reasons that it can’t be that way; just accept it as a premise and then visualize the consequences. So that you’ll think, ‘Well, if there are no souls, I can just sign up for cryonics,’ or ‘If there is no God, I can just go on being moral anyway,’ rather than it being too horrifying to face. As a matter of self-respect, you should try to believe the truth no matter how uncomfortable it is, like I said before; but as a matter of human nature, it helps to make a belief less uncomfortable, before you try to evaluate the evidence for it.”

The principle behind the technique is simple: as Sun Tzu advises you to do with your enemies, you must do with yourself—leave yourself a line of retreat, so that you will have less trouble retreating. The prospect of losing your job, for example, may seem a lot more scary when you can’t even bear to think about it than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in...

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