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hegemonicon comments on Man-with-a-hammer syndrome - Less Wrong
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Not my experience. Realizing that "every single time I've gotten super-excited about a new idea and tried applying it to everything, I've been wrong" is effective, for me at least, in tempering how I apply it.
Subconscious processes (such as strong feelings of emotion and the certainty that accompanies them) are generally not consciously accessible. For example, no matter how much you know that squares A and B are the same color, they will appear to be different because the vision system processes the image automatically. Compensating for subconscious judgments that you know are misguided is an enormous part of what being a "rationalist" is.
I looked at squares A and B and found that if I stared at it for a few seconds, I could see both squares as being the same color. (Of course, the best way to see it would have been as a checkerboard pattern multiplied by a shadow with a maximum ratio equal to the light/dark ratio; I definitely couldn't do that.) I decided to check whether I could also see a light square outside the shadow and a dark square inside the shadow as being the same color, but the time I decided that, I noticed that I could no longer see A and B as being the same color. I'll have to have another go at it in a few minutes.
(Which is now, as this post took me a couple of hours to write.)
No, I can't see a light-outside square and a dark-inside square as being the same color. Neat.