Just a personal problem that seems to me to be a precursor to the rationality question.
Various studies have shown that a persons 'memory' of events is very much influenced by later discussion of the event, when put into situations such as the 'Stanford Prison Experiment' or the 'Milgram Experiment' people will do unethical acts under pressure of authority and situation.
Yet people have a two-fold response to these experiments. A) They deny the experiments are accurate, either in whole, or in degree B) They deny that they fall into the realm of those that would be so affected.
With of course, the obvious caveat that some people actually are not so affected in those experiments (or do remember thing accurately), and will stand up for what they determine as ethical regardless.
The obvious fact seems to be that it is among those that honestly consider the possibility that their thoughts can be affected by these outside influences that the greatest chance of successfully maintaining one's own identity against them exists, but others than acknowledging this fact (Which can certainly be faked, even self-deceptively) what self-assessments allow one to develop this?
Once we have that, it seems to me that the question of maintaining rationality itself clarifies itself greatly.
Jonnan
So you think you want to be rational, to believe what is true even when sirens tempt you? Great, get to work; there's lots you can do. Do you want to justifiably believe that you are more rational than others, smugly knowing your beliefs are more accurate? Hold on; this is hard.
Humans nearly universally find excuses to believe that they are more correct that others, at least on the important things. They point to others' incredible beliefs, to biases afflicting others, and to estimation tasks where they are especially skilled. But they forget most everyone can point to such things.
But shouldn't you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such issues your mind would then systematically, broadly, and reasonably incorporate those insights into your reasoning processes.
But what if your mind is far from rational? What if your mind is likely to just go through the motions of studying rationality to allow itself to smugly believe it is more accurate, or to bond you more closely to your social allies?
It seems to me that if you are serious about actually being rational, rather than just believing in your rationality or joining a group that thinks itself rational, you should try hard and often to test your rationality. But how can you do that?
To test the rationality of your beliefs, you could sometimes declare beliefs, and later score those beliefs via tests where high scoring beliefs tend to be more rational. Better tests are those where scores are more tightly and reliably correlated with rationality. So, what are good rationality tests?