Mental Liquidity

As far as "strong opinions, weakly held", this is one of my favorites at work in a large scale product engineering environment. It goes beyond "mental liquidity" as described in the OA (which is really just about the "weakly held" part). The "strong opinions" part is that often times groups will succumb to analysis paralysis or unwillingness to make a decision due to group dynamics. Having a strong opinion (ideally backed by knowledge and expertise) is a way to push through and bring clarity. The risk is there is a personality type prone to blustering overconfidence that will push a group in a certain direction without reasonable justification. Ideally what you want is a critical mass of smart, decisive, but open-minded people who are quick to assimilate new evidence into their viewpoint.

If I believe the Clinton's are pedophiles and murderers and are part of a ring of like minded people, and I'm inundated with information from people and organizations which support this (or at least carefully don't refute it), then when I'm presented with information about a pizza parlor that is supposedly holding children in the basement, is that consistent with my beliefs?

I think what you're presenting is just what everyone already does. Instead of assessing thi gs based on how well they fit our beliefs, we should assess them based on a consistent objective standard, and then alter our beliefs if it meets that standard but conflicts with our beliefs.

This may in fact be what you belief, because you belive in facts and the importance of the truth. The problem is that you get wildly different results when someone that values different things applies the same system.

However, one day, a philosopher found a situation in which a justified true belief was incorrect. This is the Gettier problem.

What you describe is something akin to a network of baysian conditionals attached to certain proposition, which upon confrontation with new information update their relative weights. We know with certainty that this process has significant benefits in general (it's certainly better than most systems not internalizing new information), but can and does create false reasoning.

In short, it's good but not sufficient to create knowledge. The problem of individuals creating ideological filter bubbles around themselves is very related to the idea that their evidentiary priors become more and more rigid as they note confirmatory evidence over time that justifies their views over time. The issue isn't that they stop intaking new information, but that their priors and the new information are interpreted based upon that belief network.

Thankfully, as a super-organism, we have a great solution for that mental ossification. We die. New people who have less evidentiary accumulation can address the issue with new priors and often that's all that's needed for huge breakthroughs.

Coining a new term when a perfectly good one exists is unfortunate but happens, as see with the author here.

Edit: here's a link to neuroplasticity (aka brain plasticity):

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity