Psychology has shown that there's very little you can do to make yourself 'more rational.'
Citation needed.
Not to mention that what an average person can or can not do isn't particularly illuminating for non-representative subsets like LW.
maybe LW has gone severely overboard with the instrumental rationality thing
I am not sure that is possible. Instrumental rationality is just making sure that what you are doing is useful in getting to wherever you want to go. What does "severely overboard" mean in this context?
Citation needed.
Read Dan Kahneman's work. He's spent his entire lifetime studying this and won a nobel prize for it too. A good summary is given in http://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-people-are-stupid Here's an excerpt:
'as the scientists note, “people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” This finding wouldn’t surprise Kahneman, who admits in “Thinking, Fast and Slow” that his decades of groundbreaking research have failed to significantly improve his own mental performance. “My intuitive thinking...
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