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Pavitra comments on LW is to rationality as AIXI is to intelligence - Less Wrong
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That is indeed a correct answer to a reasonable interpretation of the question I asked. I thereby realize that I should have asked differently.
Where examples of rationality usage are given on LW, they tend to be of the straightforward decision-theoretic kind, such as solving the trolley problem; that is, rationality and studied and taught here is mostly about helping humans better make the kinds of decisions that tend to be made by humans.
Suppose I want to take an umbrella to work with me if and only if it will rain this afternoon. How might I go about deciding whether to take my umbrella? And, in particular, is running my own statistical analysis on the weather patterns in my local area over the past hundred years really a better choice than just turning on the weather channel?
Perhaps I am missing something, but the answer is obviously no. This follows from the usual humility and outside view arguments, and from more detailed inside view considerations like the following: the weather station has access to far more data than you over that time period, and has detailed recent data you do not, and can hire a weather statistics expert (or draw on such expertise) who will crush your predictions because they specialize in such problems.
The answer was intended to be obviously no. I wished to refute the idea that esoteric mathematical models like prediction-as-data-compression translated directly into useful advice for the real world outside of a few highly technical cases.