The Posture of Thought

The Martial Art of Rationality has always stuck with me — the notion that a mind can be trained like a body, drilled in stances and forms. And using your mental capabilities effectively often comes down to adopting the right stance for the occasion.Asking yourself, in this context, do I need to be ready to run, jump, catch, throw, duck, dive, dodge or something else entirely?Two dimensions important to your stance are forward-back lean, and left-right width.The setup I've wanted to contribute to LW for some time.Recently, I decided to get more serious about actually doing it. (Such an amazing strategy getting serious, isn't it?)I kept having self-doubting thoughts about how anything I produced would lack rigour, originality, or wit. It wouldn't even be interesting, let alone useful.They were stupid thoughts.Once I accepted their stupidity, I levelled-up and gained the ability to operationalise my task. I could write a post that was a response to someone else's. Genius! I've solved blogging.This was important for me: I could piggyback off another post's originality and interestingness; all I had to do was provide a perspective, which would be the originality factor.I grabbed everything I needed, threw it in a bindle, and set out... to read blog posts. So that I could find something to have an opinion on.... and it would not come.Mental block?I'd read something and think "Cool, what a great insight."Hmm. I've updated my beliefs, but no opinion. No matter, I'll get it on the next one.After the next piece was finished, same conclusion. That's alright, wasn't a good fit for me — probably why it was such an interesting post to read."Wow, amazing reasoning. I'd have never picked that conclusion.""Not my forte, but I liked that paragraph at the end.""Yep, that makes sense."But then, I realised, that does not make sense.Not the article. The result of the process. How was I reading post-after-post, looking at comments, and not discovering an opinion within the boundary of my m