This advice can backfire, but it can also work well.

True, but to what extent? My impression is that it's very unlikely that it backfires. I imagine it being used primarily in situations where it's pretty obvious (if you thought about it) that the person means one thing, but that they're just being imprecise with their words.

I'm going to get very frustrated -- trying phrasing after phrasing until you hear what I'm actually saying (or I'll walk away).

I think that only one attempt would ever be made. In a face-to-face conversation, you'd probably just ask them to clarify. In an online one, if someone says, "I think you meant A, so X." and they're wrong, you'd just respond by saying, "no, I meant B".

If anyone else is interested in them, I'm willing to score, count, and/or categorize the responses to the "Changes in Routine" and "What Different" questions.

However, I've started to try and develop a scheme for the former... and I've hit twenty different categories (counting subcategories) and will probably end up with 5-10 more if I don't prune them down.

What sort of things do you think might be interesting to look for?

(Though I haven't started to do work on paper, the latter seems like a much simpler problem. However, if you have thoughts on the selection of bins, please share them.)

(As a note: I would be able to modify the .xls or such, but some one else would have to do the stats; I haven't developed practical skills in that field yet, so the turnaround time would be awful.)

So by that standard almost no politicians believe in global warming.

Notice how all the rich actors who show up at charity events to "fight global warming" are also lining up to buy beach front property. (They also tend to fly around in private jets, but that's a separate issue.)

Edit: The reason I didn't use politicians in the above example is that not all politicians can afford beachfront property and the ability to do so correlates with other things that may be relevant to whether you want him in power.

I suspect that, while it is a legitimate distinction, dividing these skill-rankings into life domains:

A) Confuses what I feel to be your main (or at least, old) idea of agency, which focuses on the habit of intentionally improving situations, with the domain-specific knowledge required to be successful in improving a situation.

Mostly, I don't like the idea of redefining the word agency to be the product of domain-skills, generic rationality skills, and the habit of using rationality in that domain... because that's the same thing as succeeding in that domain (what we call winning) - well, minus situation effects, anyways. It seems far better to me to use "agency" to refer only to the habitual application of rationality.

You still find that agency is domain specific, but now it is separate from domain skills; give someone who is an agent in a domain some knowledge about the operative principles of that domain, and they start improving their situation; give a non-agent better information and you have the average Lifehacker reader: they read all this advice and don't implement any of it.

B) Isn't near fine-grained enough.

Besides the usual psych 100 stuff about people remembering things better in the same environment they learned them in (How many environments can you think of, now, how many life domains; what's the ratio between those numbers? In the hundreds?), an anecdote which really drove the point home for me:

I have a game I'm familiar with (Echoes), which requires concurrent joystick and mouse input, and I like to train myself to use various messed-up control schemes (for instance, axis inversion). For several days I have to make my movements using a very attention-hungry, slow, deliberate process; over time this process gets faster and less attention hungry, reducing the frequency and severity of slip-ups until I am once again good at the game. I feel the parallels to a rationality practice are obvious.

Relevantly, the preference for the new control scheme then persists for some time... but, for instance, the last one only activated when some deep pattern matching hardware noticed that I had my hand on the joystick AND was playing that game AND was dodging (menus were no problem)... if I withdrew any of those conditions, mouse control was again fluent; but put your hand back on the joystick, and three seconds later...

So, I suppose my point in this subsection is that you cannot safely assume that because you've observed yourself being "agenty" in (say) several relationship situations, you are acting with agency in any particular relationship, topic, time, place, or situation.

(Also, I expect, the above game-learning situation would provide a really good way to screen substances and other interventions for rationality effects, but I haven't done enough experimentation with that to draw any conclusions about the technique or any specific substances.)