Yesterday, I started playing around with the idea of doing rationality business consulting.

My basic idea is as follows. Use my contacts to get in touch with a number of suitable companies and offer to hold them a free presentation on rationality ideas. If they agree, hold a lecture maybe an hour long, packed full of interesting and obviously valuable concepts thrown at the audience at a rapid pace. At the end, thank them for their time, take any questions they might have, and mention that I also have an extended lecture series prepared that covers these topics in more detail, and many others besides. Offer to hold those lectures in exchange for a sizable sum, or if they're not interested, ask them if they could at least recommend me to somebody who might be.

If I just have a good enough presentation, act confident enough and price myself appropriately, it seems to me like this should result in sales pretty quickly. And presentations are one of the few areas where I don't have issues with confidence - if I've practiced a lecture enough and know the content, I get more excited than nervous.

I've scribbled down some random ideas on content to be included in my opening lecture: this is still a very rough draft, with ideas chosen more or less at random as they came to mind, but feedback is more than welcome.

How to act and decide better

• Inside/outside views
• Checklists
• The conjunction fallacy

How to communicate better

• Take inferential distances into account
• The illusion of transparency

• Explainers shoot high, aim low

• Be specific

• Hold off proposing solutions
• If a debate is becoming confrontational, adopt a rule saying that each debate partner must start their comment by briefly recapping what the other person just said. This helps to both make sure that they understood correctly, and to convince the other that their point was heard and understood. Studies show that this reduces the amount of time debates on average take.

How to improve company atmosphere: status games and offense

• Humans constantly play various status games with each other, often more or less unconsciously. Becoming more aware of the status games helps take them less seriously. Impro has a lot of status game exercises that can be used to make people more aware of them.
• A major reason for people taking offense is that they think their status is being lowered. If everyone understands this, it can help defuse conflicts as it becomes easier to make explicit the reasons for being offended. "I experienced X as offensive because I felt that it implied I wasn't good at Y, and that I therefore wasn't of much value." "Oh, I didn't mean that."
• The ABC of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Activating Event, Belief, Consequence. A boss asks "have you done the task I gave you, the deadline is approaching?", the subordinate believes this to mean that the boss doesn't trust his ability to get things done without micromanagement, gets depressed. CBT attacks the "Belief" stage and encourages one to ask whether the beliefs are reasonable.
• Verbal self-defense: ways to deflect hostile statements so that they don't escalate into conflict.
• Various cultural differences that may lead to conflict, e.g. askers versus guessers.

Other

• Signaling and the damage done by excess signaling; The Curse of Identity

Other, completely unorganized

(This section was written when I just started coming up with ideas one after another and stopped trying to sort them or make them very comprehensible to outsiders, so don't worry if you don't understand all of the points.)

• 59 seconds
• Robbins: coloring memories, other things
• Radical Honesty? Perhaps something a bit less radical...
• commitment effects
• • beware identity
• • Goertzel's quote on identity
• • self-signaling
• • success spirals
• • Mindset
• PJ Eby on Akrasia, lukeprog on procrastination, procrastination book
• sick relationships
• life hacker?
• “think of the opposite”; bayes' theorem in everyday life
• what intelligence tests miss
• what data generated that thought
• that one paper on an ideal working environment
• flow
• psychology of happiness and well-being; the 3-1 rule
• pjeby: instant motivation
• prediction markets?
• humans are not automatically strategic
• relating to the curse of identity: analyzing the concrete consequences of decisions, the effect of social norms on decision-making (school example), charity examples, scope neglect, political ignorance
• • expected utility
• value of information? decision analysis sequence?
• bureaucracies and avoiding responsibility
• status quo bias; groupthink; review meetings; devil's advocates
• fundamental attribution error & benefit of doubt
• taboo your words
• the content hilighted in the comments for the various "what's been the most useful LW insight to you" posts

You'll notice that I also have a lot of content that's not strictly rationality-related. That's intentional: I figure that having useful insights on a wide variety of topics will seem more impressive and increase the likelihood that at least something in there does catch one's interest. (Also, I wrote in more detail about the non-rationality stuff because for the rationality stuff I could just link to the LW posts.)