Related to: Tsuyoku Naritai! (I Want To Become Stronger), Test Your Rationality, 3 Levels of Rationality Verification.
Robin and Eliezer ask about the ways to test rationality skills, for each of the many important purposes such testing might have. Depending on what's possible, you may want to test yourself to learn how well you are doing at your studies, at least to some extent check the sanity of the teaching that you follow, estimate the effectiveness of specific techniques, or even force a rationality test on a person whose position depends on the outcome.
Verification procedures have various weaknesses, making them admissible for one purpose and not for another. But however rigorous the verification methods are, one must first find the specific properties to test for. These properties or skills may come naturally with the art, or they may be cultivated specifically for the testing, in which case they need to be good signals, hard to demonstrate without also becoming more rational.
So, my question is this - what have you become reliably stronger at, after you walked the path of an aspiring rationalist for considerable time? Maybe you have noticeably improved at something, or maybe you haven't learned a certain skill yet, but you are reasonably sure that because of your study of rationality you'll be able to do that considerably better than other people.
This is a significantly different question from the ones Eliezer and Robin ask. Some of the skills you obtained may be virtually unverifiable, some of them may be easy to fake, some of them may be easy to learn without becoming sufficiently rational, and some of them may be standard in other disciplines. But I think it's useful to step back, and write a list of skills before selecting ones more suitable for the testing.
Ways I’ve benefitted:
My head feels clearer. I rationalize less. Life feels better and has better aesthetics.
I’m less defensive, and less attached to the particular habits or traits I started out with. I’m more willing to ditch my current ways of doing things for something else that looks promising. (This may follow from having Something to protect more than from rationality per se.)
I have more self-confidence, and I’m more likely to look around in the world and notice and address real problems, instead of self-absorbedly poking around “interesting ideas”, or notions of virtue, as a kind of entertainment. I make more decisions and am less prone to stalling around staring at all the options.
I more notice contexts where others’ starting ideas for how to proceed are better than my initial impressions, and I more often go with those ideas. I notice more contexts where others’ starting anticipations are a better guide than my starting anticipations, particularly in subjects around which I have emotional biases, and I more often believe them.
I’m more likely to stick with a difficult question instead of shying away from it.
My social skills have improved somewhat.
I'm more likely to notice when the evidence favors a particular hypothesis, instead of making up entertaining arguments to myself about how I could support this side, or that side, and aren't I far-sighted to be above the fray.
I have more true beliefs and fewer false beliefs.
When I do science, I’m better able to look at the evidence first, move through many possible hypotheses, etc., instead of staying locked into my own relatively boring initial research avenue.
Thank you! This is almost exactly my own list, but for some weird reason I had huge difficulty articulating.
I'm not sure why that was so tricky. I thought about it a lot, because despite the improvements in my thinking and decision-making, my effectiveness at actually doing stuff hasn't changed greatly. I'm steering better, but I'm not peddling faster.