What is a good heuristic for sorting things into not worth reasoning about and worth reasoning about?
Hmm. Maybe, can you think of any biases that would influence this problem? If no, go with intuition. This requires prerequisite knowledge and practice to be useful though.
Perhaps: if the outcome of a decision is not very important, go with your gut.
One offered in the article:
A rule of thumb in this direction is “Trust your gut reaction when dealing with natural tasks such as raising children.”
Maybe: when you think your answer is good enough, go with it. (So no double guessing yourself or thinking that to be a good rationalist, you should spend more time thinking things through)
This was linked to twice recently, once in a Rationality Quotes thread and once in the article about mindfulness meditation, and I thought it deserved its own article.
It's a transcript of a talk by Persi Diaconis, called "The problem of thinking too much". The general theme is more or less what you'd expect from the title: often our explicit models of things are wrong enough that trying to think them through rationally gives worse results than (e.g.) just guessing. There are some nice examples in it.