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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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I think that most people, including rationalists, have significant psychological problems that interfere with their happiness in life and impair their rationality and their pursuit of rationality. What we think of as normal is very dysfunctional, and it is dysfunctional in many more ways than just being irrational and subject to cognitive biases.
I think furthermore that before devoting yourself to rationality at the near exclusion of other types of self-improvement, you should devote some serious effort to overcoming the more mundane psychological problems such as being overly attached to material trinkets and measuring your self-worth in material terms, being unaware of your emotions and unable to express your emotions clearly and honestly, having persistent family and relationship problems, having chronic psychosomatic ailments, etc. Without attending to these sorts of issues first (or at the same time), trying to become a rationalist jedi is like trying to get a bodybuilder physique before you've fixed your diet and lost the 200 extra pounds you have.
I fear this may be wishful thinking; you can get much further than I would have thought a priori in a sub-art of rationality without developing a strong kick as well as a strong punch.
It would be interesting to try to diagram the "forced skill development" - for example, how far can you get in cognitive science before your ability to believe in a supernatural collapses - and of course the diagram would be very different for skills you studied from others versus skills you were able to invent yourself.
I'm not sure how much you mean by the doing without a kick analogy. If you mean, for example, that a rationalist should overcome something like social anxiety that impedes his research career by developing techniques from scratch rather than engaging in something like cognitive behavioral therapy, then I disagree. Ditto for the other sorts of psychological problems I mentioned.
The reason is not that I think you couldn't address anything from first principles, building up techniques as you go, but that this would be hugely inefficient, like developing calculus from first principles rather than studying a textbook.