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MartinB comments on Five-minute rationality techniques - Less Wrong
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*Candidate 1 requires intuitive understanding of probability, fat chance.
*Candidate 2 would require a rewiring of humans about the system how status is perceived.
*Candidate 3 just does not work. Talk with people about the image they have what scientists do all day. It is bad. Especially when you go to New Agers.
Maybe you assume that people have a consistent world view, or at least the desire to have one, but no. Please try the proposals on real people, and report back. I expect you to run into the problem that objective truth is widely not accepted, and few care to have correct beliefs about the world anyway.
Here my suggestions
Spend more time on expensive or repeated expenses, less time on cheap single ones.
That saved me a few times. Look for rebuttals habitually, avoid the confirmation bias. Gets harder with fringe topic.
Thats not so much rationality, but practical advice.
They are easy to explain, lead to better results. Can be tweaked in some ways to make them even better.
How to make new mistakes instead of repeating the old ones. Learning from experience in a more efficient way.
There are some articles here that can be summed up in short. But that will probably not work, because interest in techniques is not particularly widespread. You are subject to inferential distance. When an article seems trivial to you after a few reads & ponderings that indicates that you understood it. Also there is the annoying uncanny valley of rationality, where a little of it just hurts, or gets applied wrong (ever discussed a high-iq person who happens to be religious?).
What are your own favorite techniques that you actually apply?
I know it's possible, since I've rewired myself in this way, and it wasn't particularly difficult. Am I really that weird?
You don't have to use the word "science". As Darmani put it, "If it moves, you can test it." Follow up with an explanation of why a particular claim is testable, and how to test it. For example, if someone claims that he can tell the difference between an empty water jug and a full water jug with a dowsing rod, then it's easy enough to test it.
I've used this exact approach on quite a few people, and it seems to do a pretty good job of banishing their claims that whatever we're arguing about is untestable. I wouldn't bet on them generalizing this lesson, though.
The sticking point here is "good". Most people settle for really crappy counterarguments, including straw-man counterarguments concocted by people who agree with them.
It's not really about rewiring yourself. Your status depends on how others perceive you. The easiest way to have truth instead of winning arguments as conferring higher status, is to move to a community with such norms, such as LessWrong.
But we are trying to convince the general public of rationality here. So until most people have peers who already value truth over winning arguments, Candidate 2 will face significant challenges.
*Candidate 1 requires intuitive understanding of probability, fat chance.
I agree that an intuitive understanding of probability isn't likely to happen. But what you can do is train yourself to recognise at least some of the situations where your intuitive system is going to mess it up. Hopefully next time you see something and think "What a fantastic coincidence!", your next thought will be "Nice, but remember all the other fantastic coincidences that might have happened and didn't." instead of "My life is so improbable it must have been orchestrated by some unseen force."