Instrumental rationality - Updating cached thoughts

(Note change of location)

At last week's meetup where we discussed terminal and instrumental goals and being inconsistent, the conversation drifted into economic and political policies. After embarrassingly long, I realized that my cached thoughts were speaking on my behalf espousing rather strong libertarian views which I had, on several prior occasions, marked "dirty". Giles remarked that he had notes on how to deal with cached thoughts, and we decided to make it our next topic.

So, lets talk about cached selves. On how to identify them as they occur, on how to learn to say 'I don't know", or "I'm in the process of revising my opinion" and more generally, on the persistence of modifications to thought processes.

We could perhaps ponder on properties of cached thoughts, like their half lives, the degree of reinforcement they undergo upon unconscious reproduction, and so on.

The following article would be the recommended reading:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4e/cached_selves/