Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to co

Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to correct his thought processes. I recollect a short horror story in which a man becomes obsessed with "doing away" with more and more of his life he deems truly unneeded (it may have been named "To the Bone," it has been a few decades). In the harder sciences, whatever is accepted as the "the truth" is only a working model, hopefully to be replaced by something better when experiments point toward some flaw. It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them. I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."