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lukeprog comments on Skill: The Map is Not the Territory - Less Wrong
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It's too bad that these how-to posts tend to be not as popular as the philosophical posts. Good philosophy is important but I doubt it can produce rationalists of the quality that can be produced by consistent rationalist skills-training over months and years.
Philosophy posts are useful if they're interesting whereas how-to's are only useful if they work. While I greatly enjoy these posts, their effectiveness is admittedly speculative.
Philosophy posts are enjoyable if they're interesting. They're useful if they're right.
They can also inspire tangentially related thoughts which are enjoyable or useful. This is why Calculus is helpful even to people who don't do math for a living or for fun.
...I honestly can't remember anymore what it's like to look at the world without knowing calculus. How do you figure out how any rate of change relates to anything else?
By, basically, intuitively grasping the most rudimentary aspects of and implications of calculus. (Or by learning the relationship explicitly or by learning one such relationship and intuitively extrapolating principles from one domain to another.)
It might be good practice to imagine maps without calculus since so many people use them. I wouldn't be surprised if beliefs in things like global warming were divided by the knows-calculus line. How could you even explain climate change to someone who didn't understand that Temperature = dEnergy_in/dt - dEnergy_out/dt + C?
I would probably start by talking about electric heaters and how they convert energy to heat, and generalize a little to talk about the atmosphere being kind of like that. The harder part is explaining that the same energy input can cause not only temperature increases, but changes to wind and precipitation patterns.
Philosophy being right isn't enough to make it necessarily useful. There is a potentially unbounded space of philosophical concepts to explore and most of them are not of instrumental use at this particular time. We can't say much more than "They are useful if they are right and they are, well, in some way useful".
(I hesitate before pointing out the other side of the equation where a philosophy can be useful while actually being wrong because in such cases, and when unbounded processing capability is assumed, there is always going to be a 'right' philosophical principle that is at least as useful even if it is more complex, along the lines of randomized algorithms being not-better-than more thought out deterministic ones.)