Soft skills are hard. I'm extremely good at learning soft skills. I try as hard as I can to teach one whenever someone desires one, but they're damn near impossible to teach. I've thus far only been successful at teaching someone how to do something related, in a way that their mind can grasp and run with, so that a few years later they will have developed the soft skill "on their own" (At which point, they will be doing exactly as I said exactly how I told them to, and they will tell me about this cool new thing they figured out how to do, and question why I didn't ever tell them to do it that way).

So rather than teach how to learn soft skills, I'm going to describe a few of the most useful soft skills I have.

• Maximize information input in a way that maximizes timeless usability. It works like this: prioritize observations in opposite order. The observation with the highest priority is the observation that is most distant from the desired observation while still being distantly related. The observation with the lowest priority is the observation that was first intended. For example: when performing a scientific experiment, the lowest-priority observation is the result of the experiment. Literally everything you could possibly observe related to the experiment is of higher priority than the direct result of the experiment. The reason for this is that distant observations have a tendency to be more useful for the future than direct observations.
• Minimize friction to maximize usability at detail. When welding, move the welding rod and heating device at the exact rate that keeps the rod molten, and the welding pieces not-molten. When using a common carbon fiber dremel cutting blade on metal, move the blade through the metal at the exact rate that just barely melts the metal in the direction of the cut. When hammering a nail, make the nail move at a consistent rate that is fast enough to slide past the wood, but slow enough to not split the wood (this is like air resistance at sub-sonic vs super-sonic speeds). When talking to people (assuming you want to maximize usability of the other person's mind), make statements and ask questions at a rate that doesn't overload the person's mind. When drawing a picture with a pencil, move the pencil across the medium at a rate that glides across the medium without catching on the medium.
• Inference jump to maximize efficiency of skill gain. When developing a theory from a conceptual base, assume a related postulate to be true so that you can obtain more data from experiments. The postulate is most likely not true, but that's not important. Experimenting under the assumption that a postulate is true is very useful in determining why said postulate is not true. Believe nothing. Treat all beliefs and assumed truths as inference jumps, because doing so maximizes their use. In order to make inference jumps with highest usability, all previously beliefs should be considered irrelevant. Failing that, consider the possibility that what you know to be wrong, or believe to be wrong, is in fact true, and use that as an inference jump.

I personally think the conceptual base of Less Wrong is contrary to efficient soft skill development. However, I think the conceptual base of Less Wrong is a potentially good platform to use to begin soft skill development. The most efficient way I can think to do so is to learn to use the conceptual base of Less Wrong, then make the inference jump that everything you've learned from Less Wrong is uselessly inefficient. This is the pattern I see everywhere people strictly adhere to a conceptual base. It's almost always a good platform to expand further from, provided the expansion stops using the platform as soon as possible.

Your inner simulator is probably more accurate than your explicit models in domains where you have a rich experience base, such as social phenomena, and day-to-day physical phenomena.

Not true. At least not likely. If it were so, then most people would pick up soft skills in a rather automatic fashion without the need for too much conscious effort (actually, any conscious effort, since if the inner simulator is more accurate, your intuitions should lead you on the correct/correct-ish path. Ceterus Paribus, this should hold true for the majority of people (i would expect around more than 90%)

Also, I have a more general comment. A large part of the strategy advocatde here seems (to me) to be divided into rough categories: Keep trying stuff and keep reading stuff. You seem to indicate that learning hard facts should be discarded when you find them to be wrong, whereas learning soft skills involves some amount of reading "wrong ideas/facts/information". I get the feeling that you're keeping a double standard here. In the sense, that the timeline for learning a hard fact seems to be almost instantaneous while soft skills seem to be a little more long term (at least that's the sense I got from reading it, as if it was implied). To further illustrate this point, consider the following thought experiment:

1. You read in a book that gravity doesn't work on cell phones. You drop your phone and find it falls. You've learnt that gravity does in fact work.

2. You read that flattering people doesn't help. You avoid flattering people and then suddenly notice that your competitors who flattered their bosses/colleagues/friends have advanced their careers/social position.

See, what I'm getting at?

RE: your frazzled after-busy state. Yeah, breathing meditation at that time is not only hard, it's kinda pointless. Well, until you get to the point where you can either enter a state of right-brain flow on purpose, or enter a REM-like state on purpose. When you can do those, breath control is a natural part of it.

A trick is to control your breath while you are busy. Every chance you get, especially when heavily focused on something, take a single slow breath, preferably into either your gut or your whole body (but just a slow breath with no direction is better than not doing it at all). If you can't do that while you are focused on something, practice. This is one of the most important things people learn by practicing QiGung or internal martial arts.

In my experience, controlling my breath while I am busy allows for a faster recovery, and lessens the need for sleep after recovery.

Speaking form personal experience, the breathing meditation you did is what spawned the ability to be mindful of your physical state. This is because in order to successfully breathe into various areas of your body, you have to be mindful of that area. It is directly practicing physical awareness.

The fact that you have become aware of subtleties of flight-or-flight responses is extremely good. That's stage 2 of what it is possible to be mindful of.

Stage 3 is emotions. Try purposefully creating emotions. Try listening to music, and enhancing the emotions you feel from the music one at a time, and slowly. Try changing your emotions the same way you breathe into different parts of your body. Try creating an emotion when you breathe in, and letting it dissipate when you breathe out.

Stage 4 is thoughts. Stage 5 is intuition. Stage 6 is deep subconscious data grouping and relationships. Stage 7 and 8 are a lot more complicated. Stage 8 is what Taoists call "the Tao".

At stage 4, you should also begin practicing what is called "dissolving" in Taoist meditation. That's the ability to be aware of a stuck thought/feeling/whatever, and allow it to dissipate. Methods of doing this involve breathing into the very precise spot you feel is tense when you become aware of the stuck feeling, or slowly stretching and contracting that spot to get the tissues and fluids moving; and may also include image training to imagine that spot liquefying, then gassifying, then becoming a part of your breath so that you can breathe it out. The trick is to become as aware of the stuck feeling as you possibly can, and then relax it slowly. It's necessary to realize that your thoughts and feelings are connected to your fibrous body tissues in order to accomplish this (for example: thought control is connected to nerve tissue control).

Be careful of image meditation. If you choose to go beyond halfway through the path of meditation, you will have to remove all of the images you accidentally lock into your body.

PS. "stages" overlap. "stage" is a loose term I came up with to describe it just now. The Taoists call it "the 8 bodies". They're just a reference so that you can know what is possible, and approximately how much effort is required in order to accomplish it. Half way through, the game changes. All of the way through, the game changes again.

Well, I hate to say something against your post here, because I quite agree with it all. Except there is one Mind Projection Fallacy of which I question whether it was done on purpose. The fallacy where you are reducing the poem to it's parts.

The majority of poetry is metaphor. All of the specific examples in that poem are metaphors for the feeling of majesty. So to the poet, those three examples are quite the same. The poet's distaste for scientific reduction isn't that everything is explained away, it's that explaining something reduces it's perceived majesty.

Now, to us reductionists, it is the opposite. Explaining something increases it's perceived majesty. The more explanation required (literally required), the more majestic it is. The difference is a simple alignment of the feeling of majesty. Whether it be aligned to interpretation, or to perception.

So yes, believers in things will likely read the poem and presume that the poet means that rainbows are explained away. Most believers in things certainly react that way, including you. But that was not the intent of the poem (presuming the poet was not a hack). In modern times, the only reason that explanation of the poem is available to us is because we already know that mythical creatures (including ghosts) don't exist. The only reason that explanation of the poem is available to us is because most non-reductionists are actually reductionists, having a strong, deep belief that many things have been explained away by reduction.

However, back when mythical creatures like gnomes and haunts were imagined, it was not without a reason. Never assume that people are referring to mystical creatures and magic when they talk of their perception of reality. They are simply using metaphor to explain something their brain cannot grasp at the moment of perception. Most of the time, they don't even know they're doing it, and so believe the metaphor to be literal. But just because they use the wrong words, that doesn't mean their perception is false, only that their interpretation of their perception is false. The haunts in the air and the gnomes in the mine are still there, they're just not called "haunts" and "gnomes".

So, like the rainbow, haunts and gnomes were not explained away. All three were just explained. What was explained away was the interpretation. What was explained was the perception.

Could you enlighten us with your preferred approach to meditation then? I've had very positive experiences just with simple breathing exercises, but I'd definitely like to improve.

Does anyone know how to get offended? I have never experienced the emotion and am interested to know what it feels like.

As jooyous noted, one of the most important skills is to be able to notice when you are offended, or otherwise emotionally hampered. This is not at all trivial, as you can see from the discussion threads here, where people who are clearly emotionally compromised behave as if they were acting rationally. (Yes, I am guilty of this, too.) I am not sure how to develop this skill of noticing being offended while being offended, but surely there is a training for it. Maybe something as simple as a checklist to go through before commenting would be a start. Checklists are generally a good idea.

But on a long term basis, if you find yourself constantly on the recieving end of moving fists, you might want to seriously consider learning to dodge better.

That really, really depends though. Two different people may find themselves in that situation for completely different reasons. Some folks really just can't catch a break; others really are ready to see a slight in anything that remotely discomfits them. Some folks need to learn to dodge better, some folks probably won't get far with any advice that tells them to do something different since all these moving fists are not their idea and they're taking pains to avoid as it is, and I daresay many folks will encounter both types of situations because moving fists are not a single class of thing...

You give up the notion "if <thing I don't prefer is the case in the universe> then <I must make myself sad or anxious or offended>".

Right, so I think what is being missed here is the functional role sadness, anxiety and offense play in motivating human action. Sadness has intensionality - it is about something - and its proper role in a human mind is to motivate various complex responses along the lines of "avoid this" or "prevent this from ever happening again." Lose the sadness and you lose the motivational power it contains. I don't think this motivational power is actually replaceable by a more generic abstract preference. (Or else charity fundraising would just say "we offer 20 utilitons per dollar" and that would be enough.)

Of course, the kind of emotional distancing recommended here might be necessary if the sadness/anxiety/offense actually becomes, in itself, an obstacle to achieving your goals - which can certainly happen. But it is not the general case.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I am talking descriptively about humans, not prescriptively here. It's too bad that we aren't strongly motivated by "20 utilitons per dollar." We should be! But we aren't.