I was always the chick who questioned everything. ... Still blows my mind I was that babbling little cult-idiot.
Questioning everything is too hard. I don't think it's uncommon for a radical skeptic to just get fed up with the misery of never being able to rely on anything, and abruptly settle on something — even something ridiculous — just to escape from the helplessness of total doubt. Like a kid who takes his piggy bank savings to the fair and is so careful about spending it wisely that he keeps it until the fair is about to close, and then suddenly spends it all on a big Micky Mouse balloon that he doesn't even like, because it's the best shot he's got left at having some fun at the fair, instead of just counting pennies and talking himself out of fun. Or maybe like a sailor who doesn't want to trust any leaky vessel, and winds up clutching driftwood when he's too tired to swim. Anyway, I think I can understand how former skeptics can become the most blindly dogmatic. They don't know how to be just a bit critical, and revise things bit by bit, because they've never done that; all they know is total belief and total doubt. If their experience was that doubt was misery and belief was relief, they'll be really reluctant to go back to doubt. So they can't be even critical a bit.
Hubbard's notion of the 'stable datum' is a rehash of a long-familiar truth. You need to take some things for granted. Faith really is a virtue: it helps you get things done, to be able to act on an assumption even though it's not proven.
Science is not about rejecting all assumptions, or doubting everything. Not at all; on the contrary, science needs a lot of infrastructure, both material and theoretical. You can't discard any of that lightly. But what science does do, that humans don't do naturally, is to keep on questioning things a little bit, all the time. Keep on poking and probing, even when things seem to be solid and sound. Otto Neurath framed this principle as an analogy: science is like a ship that is constantly under repair even though it is at sea. You simply stand on the part of the ship that seems most solid, and from there you try to replace the part that seems worst. The plank you stood on then may well be replaced itself, eventually, but that's all right. As long as it held up long enough, to give you a place to stand to repair something else, without everything sinking, then it was good enough for the time.
I think Neurath's is a great analogy. Being a scientist is like being a sailor in those circumstances. You know that your ship has things wrong with it, but you're not quite sure where. You don't decide that some parts are perfect, and never question them, and throw everything else over the side. You try to decide which parts seem best, and you use them as working assumptions, while you work on the parts that seem worst. You keep doing that; you never panic but you never rest. Eventually you may replace the entire ship, even many times over. But you do it a bit at a time. You might get your feet a bit wet but you never have to swim.
That's the kind of thinking that neither total fanatics nor total skeptics seem to know. It's not easy, because you never get to sit back and believe your boat is perfect; but it's not misery, either. You've always got a boat.
Everybody gets a nickname! 
