According to LessWrong essayist Dongerous, your intellectual posture shapes what you can think. Drawing on martial arts metaphors, he describes mental stances along two axes: forward versus backward lean—how actively you engage versus how receptively you listen—and stance width, determining whether you branch into multiple ideas or follow a linear path. The key insight: deference to authority shifts you backward mentally, suppressing opinion-formation. Different intellectual tasks demand different postures. The challenge is recognizing which stance fits the work you're doing, and having the flexibility to shift between them.

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