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hegemonicon comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure if it was your intent to point this out by contrast, but I would like to point out that a reasonable art of "kicking" would not rely on you making conscious decisions, let alone explicitly rational ones. Rather, it would rely on you ensuring that your subconscious has been freed from sources of bias ahead of time, and is therefore able to safely leap to conclusions in its usual fashion. An art that requires you to think at the time things are actually happening is not much of an art.
Case in point: when reading "Stuck In The Middle With Bruce", I became aware of a subconsciously self-sabotaging behavior I'd done recently. So I "kicked" it out by crosslinking the behavior with its goal-satisfaction state. It would be crazy to wait until the next occasion for that behavior to strike, and then try to reason my way around it, when I can just fix the bloody thing in the first place. (Interestingly, I mentioned the story to my wife, and described how it related to my own behavior... and she thought of a different sort of self-sabotage she was doing, and applied the same mindhack. So, as of now, I'd say that story was one of the top 5 most valuable things I've gotten from LW.)
Now, in the case of extinguishing a behavior, there's no way you can absolutely prove you've fixed something permanently; the best you can do is show that the thought process that you use to produce an autonomous response before applying a technique, no longer produces the same response afterward. Also, sometimes you catch a break: you find yourself in a situation, expecting yourself to do the same old stupid thing you've been doing before, and then you find you don't need to, or notice a few seconds later that you already did something completely different, and a much better choice.
Truth is, our brains really aren't that bad at making decisions, once you take out the "priority overrides" that mess things up.
Anyway, I'm rambling a bit now. The point is, "kicking" is generally not something you do at the time -- you do it in advance of the next time....
Because your brain is faster than you are.
I voted this up, but I'm replying because I think it's a critical point.
Our brains are NOT designed to make conscious decisions about every thing that crosses our path. Trying to do that is like trying to walk everywhere instead of driving: it's technically possible, but it will take you forever and will be exhausting.
Our brains seem to work more like this: our brains process whatever it is we're doing at the time, and then feed that processed data into our subconscious for use later. Sure it jumps in every once in a while for something important, but generally it sits back and lets your subconscious do the driving.
Rationality should be about putting the best processed information down into your subconscious, so it works the way you'd like it too. Trying to do everything consciously is a poor use of your brain, as it 1) ignores the way your brain is designed to function and 2) forgoes the use of the powerful subconscious circuitry that makes up an enormous part of it.