Eliezer, I have recommended to you before that you read The Darkness That Comes Before and the associated trilogy. I repeat that recommendation now. The monastery of Ishual is your rationalist dojo, and Anasurimbor Kellhus is your beisutsukai surrounded by a visible aura of formidability. The book might even give you an idea or two.

My only worry with the idea of these dojos is that I doubt the difference between us and Anasurimbor Kellhus is primarily a difference in rationality levels. I think it is more likely to be akrasia. Even an irrational, downright stupid person can probably think of fifty ways to improve his life, most of which will work very well if he only does them (quit smoking, quit drinking, study harder in school, go on a diet). And a lot of people with pretty well developed senses of rationality whom I know, don't use them for anything more interesting than winning debates about abortion or something. Maybe the reason rationalists rarely do that much better than anyone else is that they're not actually using all that extra brainpower they develop. The solution to that isn't more brainpower.

Kellhus was able to sit down, enter the probability trance, decide on the best course of action for the immediate future, and just go do it. When I tried this, I never found the problem was in the deciding - it doesn't take a formal probability trance to chart a path through everyday life - it was in following the results. Among the few Kellhus-worthy stories I've ever heard from reality was you deciding the Singularity was the most important project, choosing to devote your life to it, and not having lost that resolve fifteen years later. If you could bottle that virtue, it would be worth more than the entire Bayesian corpus combined. I don't doubt that it's positively correlated with rationality, but I do doubt it's a 1 or even .5 correlation.