So, it seems like there's been up upswing in interest regarding meditation around here recently. I mention this because in this article Brienne advocates for several mental habits such as catching yourself having millisecond-scale mental events and arresting or reversing them, or being able to dispassionately watch herself being uncomfortable and then act on that discomfort in an effectively dissociated fashion. I have done exactly the same thing where I've suggested in a post that the solution to somebody's problem was to simply execute a highly specific mental contortion, with the "how" of it left as an exercise to the reader. Plug for MarkL's excellent meditation blog.

If I were to be honored with a seat on the Less Wrong High Council, I would probably lobby for some kind of short daily meditative practice to me incorporated into our dogma. Aside from various peer reviewed health benefits, I can anecdotally report that mindfulness meditation trains exactly the type of command-and-control abilities Brienne is describing.