I was left with a great idea gutted by critical examination. But that's good. That's how we make ideas better—by trying to poke holes in them and the… - Greg Craven

Knowing how to combat your own confirmation bias helps remove that huge handicap that we all share—the tendency for our beliefs to drift toward what we want to be true.

My students have described this process of testing ideas in science as: “Hit it with a sledgehammer and see if it breaks. Whatever survives is the best we've got." Science is a very adversarial activity! Hence the old adage among physicists: Physics is a contact sport.

The clever part is that it changes the question from, Who should I believe? to, What should I do? After all, the physical world is unaffected by our beliefs. It reacts only to our actions.