Binding yourself in advance against your own future weakness — like Odysseus having himself tied to the mast so he could hear the Sirens without steering the ship to ruin.

Odysseus knew the Sirens' song would overpower his judgement, so he didn't rely on willpower in the moment — he arranged his circumstances beforehand: stuffed his crew's ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast. The principle generalises: when you know your in-the-moment self will be tempted or impaired, set up self-protection mechanisms ahead of time. Budelacci's everyday examples: barring yourself from the casino, or simply not buying chocolate so it isn't in the house. Applied to thinking, it means designing your environment (leaving echo chambers, limiting feeds) so good judgement doesn't depend on resisting temptation through sheer effort each time.

Tip: This is "old thinking vs new thinking" in miniature — recognising that the rational in-the-moment mind is unreliable, and outsmarting it by acting on the world in advance rather than trusting future willpower.

Go deeper:

• Wikipedia — Ulysses pact — a decision made to bind your own future self, named for Odysseus and the Sirens.

A disposition that hampers good thinking, research and learning — the systematic mirror-image of an epistemic virtue.

Epistemic vices are character traits that get in the way of good epistemic conduct. Most map directly onto a virtue as its failure mode:

Tip: Notice the last row has two vices for one virtue — that's the "virtue as the mean" idea. Both doubting everything and believing everything are failures; the virtue lies between them.

Go deeper:

• Epistemic virtue (Wikipedia) — lists the virtues and their matching vices.