Try it. See what happens.
Good heuristic.
Results: It appears that I am commenting on LW! That can't ever be the result of any sort of planned course of action. I'm going to go work on a pending document about strategy for developing a framework for developing a framework for 'naturalistic meta-ethics'. If I run out of steam on that I'll start thinking about how to think about something cool like timeless validity semantics instead.
Still, it took quite a bit of work to get to the point where mindfulness of local irrationality led to probabilistic achievement of what might end up happening to be my (or whoever ends up mattering's) actual (super)goals, if I'm at even at that point yet, and I suspect that most people would probably benefit from questioning larger scale irrationality more than local stuff, even after taking into account cumulative skill growth etc.
(The point being that some rationality is indeed better than no rationality, but if rationality is a limited resource you might as well start with the most important potential sources of irrationality, unless there's some kind of bootstrapping dynamic that I don't see right now.)
(The point being that some rationality is indeed better than no rationality, but if rationality is a limited resource you might as well start with the most important potential sources of irrationality, unless there's some kind of bootstrapping dynamic that I don't see right now.)
Habit building
At today's meetup in Tortuga, we were supposed to discuss something we're currently being irrational about. In retrospect I could probably have done better than the item I picked (for example, it now occurs to me that I'm probably currently being irrational about bedtimes and sleep-cycle stuff)...
But the key point is that while straining my brain to think of something I was currently being irrational about, but hadn't fixed yet, I noticed myself being irrational in small ways too.
For example, I was sitting on the floor in a way that was beginning to strain my left thigh, but wasn't standing up and finding a chair...
So I stood up and found a chair.
I think it might be a valuable exercise to spend an hour practicing rationalist mindfulness, constantly asking yourself, "What am I currently doing that is not rational?" as though you had to find something to fulfill your obligation to an LW meetup.