The following was comment from discussion of the original post, and I thought it was great. Does anyone know how I might go about designing and practicing such calibration tests well?

“I'd suggest that there is a relatively straightforward and unproblematic place to apply humility: to overcome the universal overconfidence bias. Many studies have found that when asked to give estimates with a confidence interval, error rates are far higher than would be expected if the confidence interval were accurate. Many of these find errors an order of magnitude or more than subjects expected. You could take self-tests and find out what your overconfidence level is, then develop a calibration scale to correct your estimates. You could then use this to modify your confidence levels on future guesses and approach an unbiased estimate. One risk is that knowing that you are going to modify your intuitive or even logically-deduced confidence level may interfere with your initial guess. This might go in either direction, depending on your personality. It could be that knowing you are going to increase your error estimate will motivate you to subconsciously decrease your initial error estimate, so as to neutralize the anticipated adjustment. Or in the other direction, it could be that knowing that you always guess too low an error will cause you to raise your error guesses, so that your correction factor is too high. However both of these could be dealt with in time by re-taking tests while applying your error calibration, adjusting it as needed.”

If "humility" can be used to justify both activities and their opposites so easily, perhaps it's a useless concept and should be tabooed.

If a particular impediment to accurate belief is a bias, what actionable consequences does that have relative to it not being a bias? EY seems to hint at biases being more difficult to correct than other impediments, and intuitively that makes sense, but is the actual approach any different?

This definition of bias seems problematic. If a putative bias is caused by absorbed cultural mores, then supposedly it is not a bias. But that causal chain can be tricky to track down; we go on thinking something is a 'bias' until we find the black swan culture where the bias doesn't exist, and then realize that the problem was not inherent in our mental machinery. But is that distinction even worth making, if we don't know what caused the bias?

Is there any decent literature on the extent to which the fact of knowing that my shoelaces are untied is a real property of the universe? Clearly it has measurable consequences - it will result in a predictable action taking place with a high probability. Saying 'I predict that when someone will tie his shoelaces when he sees they're undone' is based not on the shoelaces being untied, nor on the photons bouncing, but on this abstract concept of them knowing. Is there a mathematical basis for stating that the universe has measurably changed in a nonrandom way once those photons' effects are analysed? I'd love to read more on this.

This was a comment from the original post, and I agree with this sentiment. There was no response, so I'm wondering if anyone can answer this question now.

Note: I don't know who the author is because I have Kibitzing on in Chrome and for some reason I cannot turn it off right now.

I wonder how much of a correlation there is between people who put effort into self-training in rationality (or communal training, a la Less Wrong) and those who actually train a martial art. And I don't mean in the "Now I'lll be able to beat up people Hoo-AH" three-week-course training - I mean real, long-term, long-rewards-curve training. I've done aikido on and off for years (my life's been too hectic to settle down to a single dojo, sadly), and it takes a similar sort of dedication, determination, and self-reflection as a serious foray into training your mind to rationality. And, I'd go so far as to say, a similar 'predilection of mind and preference' (and I'll let you LWers go to town on that one).