More important than coming up with a correct grand narrative, is coming up with a world conception that allows a high degree of functionality and adaptability. I doubt if the strongest rationalist has the correct ideas about everything or would have time in her lifetime to reason all the things most important to her.
Taking principles, tempered by material results, as goals instead of using pure technical reasoning skills, can be very useful in uncertain circumstances.
For example: you are in a classroom debating whether the development of Irani nuclear weapons will stabilize or destabilize the Middle East. There is no means of empirically testing your hypothesis, but your reasoning should still be based upon sound principles.
In principle, people who have special knowledge in things are better equipped to make judgments about those things: you might notice that you don't know a lot about the history of the Middle East, like how Israel made itself a state by kicking the Palestinians off their land or the history of western imperialism in Iran. So you read a bunch of media sources on current events.
Then, again in principle, you might look at the motivations different people have for claiming different things about world events. Though it's not a situation-specific methodology, the principles are useful in any situation to providing you the right background from which to rationally make and refute claims.
After striving to exhaust your principle-informed objectives, temper your reasoning by material reality. You should ideally argue in a manner that allows everyone to have the most fulfilling dialogue. Socrates would never tell people the answers to problems; instead he would always be questioning. Even if you can reason the way around people, it's important to take into account how they will react to your methods.
By maintaining good principles, abstracting lessons from other situations, and letting reality guide you, you should be able to hone your reasoning skills upwards.
Today's post, A Prodigy of Refutation was originally published on 18 September 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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