The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking • Richard Carrier Blogs

…if you try really hard to refute yourself before trying to defend yourself, then the mere act of avoiding such methods of defending false beliefs will land you in methods of detecting them. Which is exactly where you want to land—if true beliefs are what you want to have... 

… And this is the key lesson for today. It is as important to pay attention to how people are defending false beliefs—the methods they are using to do that (and thereby to avoid discovering or admitting their beliefs are false)—and not just the methods used to catch their mistakes and debunk them…

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/22473