Ten Rules For Reality-Maximalists: 1) Accept that You Are Biased—Because You Are: Your beliefs did not arise in a vacuum. They were inherited from parents, absorbed from admired teachers, reinforced by peers, and stabilized in your teen-years and early twenties. You know where you lean politically, culturally, and morally—and you know which conclusions you prefer to be true. You know whether you are more liberal or conservative, more Republican or Democrat, more Tory or Labour. Those leanings and preferences are not virtues. They are mind-saboteurs, and they are constantly at work. The beliefs that feel most precious to you are precisely the ones that require the most scrutiny. If an idea flatters your tribe, confirms your identity, boosts your ego, or protects your heroes, treat it as guilty until proven innocent. dennismccarthy.substack.com/…

Rule 5: Constantly Update Your Mental Model of the World Nowhere are your biases more numerous and disorienting than in that fleeting collage of images that you mistakenly think represent the world around you. Those images you have of life, government, police, crime, transportation, healthcare, politics, red states, blue states, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, etc., are the stuff of legends, movie sets, impressions, news reports, and biases. The very world you think you live in is entirely a fantasy earthscape fastened together from all the elaborate fictions you’ve gathered from unreliable narrators. Realists treat their worldview as a draft, not a finished painting. They update aggressively when new data contradict old impressions.

One of the many proofs of North's authorship of early Shakespeare plays is the discovery of his handwritten outline to the plot of Shakespeare's Cymbeline in the margins of an old history book--a finding reported on in "The Guardian" theguardian.com/culture/2022…