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conchis comments on Saturation, Distillation, Improvisation: A Story About Procedural Knowledge And Cookies - Less Wrong
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This post raises an aspect of a topic that I've considered, and seems potentially relevant to rationality--how to formalize and train the art of learning, particularly in knowledge/skills that don't reduce simply to the kind of propositional knowledge you can look up on Wikipedia. There's a lot of knowledge out there that could be useful to a rationalist, and at least until Eliezer's secret-knowledge weirdtopia gets implemented we might as well look for ways to climb onto the giants' shoulders. After all, rationality ought to be good for something other than becoming more rational.
Unfortunately, most extant discussions of learning I've seen are written around the perspective of a teacher assuming default passivity from students, and usually are somewhat lacking in empiricism.
I agree that this is a really interesting question. A couple of half-baked thoughts:
Alicorn's formulation here is basically a search algorithm. The first two stages (Saturation and Distillation) are ways of using existing information to find decent initial values; the final stage (Experimentation) is the stepping algorithm. Thinking about it this way, it's immediately obvious that there's a lot more that could go into this last part: how to carve up the search space, how to decide which direction to step, whether to accept a step, etc. all of which have been explored extensively in other contexts. (Note: I'm not suggesting that this makes the problem trivial, or we should just think about this in terms of existing search algorithm paradigms; merely that thinking about things in this way could provide useful insights.)
One interesting facet of this sort of problem is that the precise mode of "failure" of a particular experiment can give information about where to step next. At a very basic level, you have things like burning, which, as most people will realize, suggest cooking at a lower temperature or for less time. At a higher level, you have things like the failure to form peaks, which, unless you can get more information from elsewhere, or you have a good understanding of food chemistry, you probably won't have much of an idea how to fix.