My current plan does still call for me to write a rationality book - at some point, and despite all delays - which means I have to decide what goes in the book, and what doesn't.  Obviously the vast majority of my OB content can't go into the book, because there's so much of it.

So let me ask - what was the one thing you learned from my posts on Overcoming Bias, that stands out as most important in your mind?  If you like, you can also list your numbers 2 and 3, but it will be understood that any upvotes on the comment are just agreeing with the #1, not the others.  If it was striking enough that you remember the exact post where you "got it", include that information.  If you think the most important thing is for me to rewrite a post from Robin Hanson or another contributor, go ahead and say so.  To avoid recency effects, you might want to take a quick glance at this list of all my OB posts before naming anything from just the last month - on the other hand, if you can't remember it even after a year, then it's probably not the most important thing.

Please also distinguish this question from "What was the most frequently useful thing you learned, and how did you use it?" and "What one thing has to go into the book that would (actually) make you buy a copy of that book for someone else you know?"  I'll ask those on Saturday and Sunday.

PS:  Do please think of your answer before you read the others' comments, of course.

Over the last decades, new experiments have changed science's picture of the way we think - the ways we succeed or fail to obtain the truth, or fulfill our goals. The heuristics and biases program, in cognitive psychology, has exposed dozens of major flaws in human reasoning. Social psychology shows how we succeed or fail in groups. Probability theory and decision theory have given us new mathematical foundations for understanding minds.

Less Wrong is devoted to refining the art of human rationality - the art of thinking. The new math and science deserves to be applied to our daily lives, and heard in our public voices.

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A "truel" is something like a duel, but among three gunmen. Martin Gardner popularized a puzzle based on this scenario, and there are many variants of the puzzle which mathematicians and game theorists have analyzed.

The optimal strategy varies with the details of the scenario, of course. One take-away from the analyses is that it is often disadvantageous to be very skillful. A very skillful gunman is a high-priority target.

The environment of evolutionary adaptedness undoubtedly contained multiplayer social games. If some of these games had a truel-like structure, they may have rewarded mediocrity. This might be an explanation of psychological phenomena like "fear of success" and "choking under pressure".

Robin Hanson has mentioned that there are costs to "truth-seeking". One of the example costs might be convincingly declaring "I believe in God" in order to be accepted into a religious community. I think truels are a game-theoretic structure that suggests that there are costs to (short-sighted) "winning", just as there are costs to "truth-seeking".

How can you identify truel-like situations? What should you (a rationalist) do if you might be in a truel-like situation?