People who base their beliefs on wishful thinking, self-interest, blind faith, or other such unreliable grounds are not merely intellectually slovenly; they are immoral.
One sort of example he cites is "precursive faith", when belief runs ahead of the evidence but is essential for success (e.g., borderline-excessive self-confidence in an athlete).
Ancient skeptics such as Pyrrho, Arcesilaus, and Sextus Empiricus argued that we should suspend judgment on most controversial matters because powerful and perhaps equally compelling arguments can always be given on both sides.
[4] In modern times, René Descartes wrote extensively on norms of intellectual inquiry in his Discourse on Method (1637), as did John Locke in Book 4 of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).
[5] Rules or standards that properly govern responsible belief-formation and the pursuit of intellectual excellence are what philosophers call epistemic (or "doxastic") norms.