[cubefox]

The best way to test your "mental liquidity" is to think about some hypotheses that are outside the "Overton window" or even outright taboo.

"What if ***** were true? Surely it can't be true. If it were, that would be terrible."

That's motivated reasoning. Remember that the truth of any hypothesis is not influenced by how much you want it to be true, or false. Some hypotheses are deeply uncomfortable, but you should nonetheless strive to believe the truth. Or rather, what is best supported by the evidence. Even if it hurts.

[noduerme]

Actually, most people shouldn't do that in most cases, because they aren't qualified to understand the evidence presented to them. Nor are the hypotheses they're testing their own. Valuable hypotheses arise from evidence - not vice versa. This is why juries in complex cases need so much time to be walked through subject matter by expert witnesses, and why standards of evidence are applied to what they are and aren't allowed to hear, and why the conclusions they may or may not draw are circumscribed to the cases being made by lawyers as allowed by judges. When people search the internet for evidence to support their most uncomfortable hypotheses, they'll always find it. That's how we get masses of people who believe in conspiracy theories and satanic panics, with the certainty of those who incorrectly believe they've done their own "research".

Taking up the most uncomfortable (i.e. "forbidden") hypothesis and giving it the weight required to attempt to prove it to yourself is not a systematic way of finding truth; it's a way of deceiving yourself into believing in the simplistic frameworks of other people's paranoid conspiracy theories.

[cubefox]

The above was only a case against wishful thinking and rationalization. Of course expert testimony is still some form of evidence. The point is not to willfully ignore or reinterpret the evidence because you don't like the direction it is pointing at.

It is worth citing the Litany of Gendlin:

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.

And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

[lanstin]

What was that old definition of ideology, an unreal relation to real facts?

[hgsgm]

Better: "What if were not true?"

Don't jump to new (wrong) conclusions, break out of your mental prison of conclusions.