EDIT: This was written slightly before Julia Galef's The Scout Mindset came out, and now that I've heard about it, it seems that what I'm calling "descriptive thinking" is akin to the eponymous "scout mindset". So, perhaps that's a better read than this.

Most claims fall into one of two categories:

1. Descriptive claims say something about what is.
2. Normative claims say something about what ought to be.

These claims may be about the state of the world, about counterfactuals, about abstract concepts, whatever — the distinction holds in general. While it is impossible to go through life without making, or at least acting on, normative claims, I contend that our culture strongly incentivizes the making of normative claims at the expense of descriptive claims, and that this is a bad thing.

(Here, I make the obvious counterargument to the obvious observation).

As a result, we do not learn to develop a border between normative and descriptive claims, leading to several deleterious cognitive habits:

• During interlocution, the treatment of statements of the form "this is the state of the world" as statements of the form "this ought to be the state of the world". (Presumed naturalism).
• A bleeding over of value judgements into judgements about the state of the world, leading to the rejection of plausible descriptive statements that are morally displeasing. (Motivated reasoning).
• In the same vein, the rejection of lines of thought or speech that merely pass through such inconvenient plausible truths, or require them in order to conduct serious thought experiments. (Goodthink).

Our cultural epistemology, insofar as such a thing can be said to exist, is primarily normative, a tendency which has likely blown up massively in the wake of the memetic metastasis that politics has undergone in the past few decades. (Naturally, politics offers the most bombastic examples, and I think conversely that most of the bombastic examples are political). I would like to motivate a descriptive epistemology.

A goal is an obligation to effect a certain change in the world. We effect such changes by running them backwards through our model of the world: given a goal, what actions do I take to achieve it? Hence, if we want to effectively achieve a goal, it is desirable that we form a good model of the world. It follows that veridicality of our world model is an instrumental goal, a desideratum towards any particular goal.

Of course, the learning required to build such a model takes time, and often isn't as useful as immediately acting. For most long-term goals, though, a great deal of learning early on vastly increases the efficiency of what action is finally taken. A relevant quote:

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.

Abraham Lincoln (not really)

You want to have a good model of the world in order to operate on it effectively — and when you're young, there's not much you can do yet anyway, so you should focus primarily on getting a good model of the world. Most ideologies function by distorting your model of the world while manipulating you to serve their ends via action, and the normative statements they try to get you to replicate distort your thinking. So, it is good to focus less on making and practicing normative judgements about the world, judgements about the way things should be, and instead focus on making descriptive judgements, judgements about the way things are, so as to build a better model of the world.

It's more of a yoga than a methodology, really, and a very hard goal to achieve. I am trying to get better at it, and what little improvement I have made has helped me immensely. It is a path against the blowing of the memetic winds, but I encourage those capable of doing so to walk it as well.