Moving toward a less deceptive interface...
So how do we tell whether our mental model is closer to reality rather than just rhetorically convincing? The answer that has slowly emerged in philosophy and science is not a single test but a set of structural constraints that good models must satisfy. These constraints allow us to detect improvement without requiring direct access to reality. By setting these limits, we can check whether we are mentally moving closer to reality or moving away from it.
The fifth constraint is resistance to cognitive bias. Humans naturally prefer models that confirm their expectations or reinforce their identity. Reliable knowledge systems therefore build procedures specifically designed to counter those biases, and they are blind experiments, statistical analysis, peer review, replication, and adversarial testing.
These procedures do not eliminate bias completely, but they reduce the probability that persuasive narratives survive purely because they feel convincing.