Good points.
I'm not trying to sneak in connotations, by the way. We're just talking about the fact that these people seem to be quite good at things like goal-factoring, VOI calculations, etc.
I didn't mean to say the sneaking was intentional. VOI calculations seem like they would correlate more with intelligence than rationality as such. I can't find any reference to goal-factoring; what do you mean by that?
Anna Salamon and I are confused. Both of us notice ourselves rationalizing on pretty much a daily basis and have to apply techniques like the Litany of Tarski pretty regularly. But in several of our test sessions for teaching rationality, a handful of people report never rationalizing and seem to have little clue what Tarski is for. They don't relate to any examples we give, whether fictitious or actual personal examples from our lives. Some of these people show signs of being rather high-level rationalists overall, although some don't.