Okay, I'll take a stab at answering. I'm kind of loath to do this because one of the main points of this post is that specific techniques are overemphasized and I think specific examples won't help with this, but perhaps a more expansive description on my part can avoid that pitfall.

In 2010, I read Patri Friedman's Self-Improvement or Shiny Distraction, which I consider to be an essentially correct indictment of things around here, or at least things around here circa 2010. This is the post that sort of jolted me out of complacency with regards to my own training.

In my experience with the martial arts, I consistently apply things that I've drilled a lot (to the point where it takes conscious effort to not do some things-- I was once called up to be a dummy for someone demonstrating a certain type of deceptive fencing attack and found it very difficult to not parry the attack, deception or no, since I had drilled the parry to that particular deception so often) I inconsistently apply things that I don't drill, and I don't apply things that I don't drill.

Rationality is, in my experience, very much the same (others have noticed this too). I consistently apply thought patterns and principles that I've invested serious time and effort into drilling, I occasionally apply thought patterns and principles that I've thought about a fair amount but haven't put really serious effort into, and I don't apply thought patterns or principles that I've heard of but not really thought about. I'm actually rather embarrassed that I didn't notice this until reading Patri's post in 2010, but so it goes.

One example of a specific rationality skill that I have invested time and effort into drilling is that of keeping my identity small. I read a lot and I read fast, and hence when I was first linked to a Paul Graham essay I read all of them in one sitting. Keep Your Identity Small stuck with me the most, but for a while it was something I sort of believed in but hadn't applied. Here's some evidence of me not having applied it-- note the date.

However, at one point in early 2011 I noticed myself feeling personally insulted when someone was making fun of a group that I used to belong to, and more importantly I noticed that that was something that I wasn't supposed to do anymore. How could this be?

Well, quite frankly, it was because despite high degrees of theoretical knowledge about rationality, I lacked the practice hours required to be good at it. Unfortunately, most rationality skills are rare enough that knowing a little bit beyond a password-guessing level makes you seem very advanced relative to others. But rationality, except in certain competitive situations, isn't about being better than others, it's about being the best you can be.

So to make a long story short, I devised methods and put in the practice hours and got better, and now I actually know a few things instead of sort of knowing a few things. I winced at how low-level I used to be when I read that post from 2010, but all in all that's probably a good sign. After all, if I didn't think my old writing was silly and confused, wouldn't that indicate that I hadn't been progressing since then? Three years of progression should yield noticeably different results.

So "Don't eat your money" is a warning against the sunk cost fallacy.

But wouldn't the rational response in the mullah's situation be to start selling the "fruits" for about the same price as the one you bought them from.

http://www.kdnuggets.com/ practical, well curated machine learning from jobs to datasets to articles

torrentz.eu - indexes various torrent sites

http://mvnrepository.com/ - search for includes on maven sites

http://www.crunchbase.com/ evaluating startups etc

slickdeals is dope, that is for sure.

I think high level generalizations are found in aphorisms and teaching stories from all around the world. They can sometimes be shorthand for a whole story, for example I often remind myself not to eat my money referencing this story:

Mulla Nasrudin, as everyone knows, comes from a country where fruit is fruit and meat is meat, and curry is never eaten. One week he was plodding along a dusty Indian road, having newly descended from the high mountains of Kafiristan, when a great thirst overtook him. "Soon," he said to himself, "I must come across somewhere that good fruit is to be had." No sooner were the words formed in his brain than he rounded a corner and saw sitting in the shade of a tree a benevolent-looking man with a basket of fruit in front of him. Piled high in the basket were huge, shiny red fruits. "This is what I need," said Nasrudin. Taking two tiny coppers from the knot at the end of his turban, he handed them to the fruit-seller. Without a word, the man handed him the whole basket, for this kind of fruit is cheap in India, and people usually buy it in smaller amounts. Nasrudin sat down in the place vacated by the fruiterer and started to much the fruits. Within a few seconds, his mouth was burning. Tears streamed down his cheeks; fire was in his throat. The Mulla went on eating. An hour or two passed, and then an Afghan hillman came past. Nasrudin hailed him, "Brother, these infidel fruits must come from the very mouth of Sheitan!" "Fool!" said the hillman. "Hast thou never heard of the chillis of Hindustan? Stop eating them at once, or death will surely claim a victim before the sun is down." "I cannot move from here," gasped the Mulla, "until I have finished the whole basketful." "Madman! those fruits belong in curry! Throw them away at once." "I am not eating fruit any more," croaked Nasrudin, "I am eating my money."

--Idries Shah's "The Pleasntries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin

"In this clip, from June 1995, Jobs says the difference between using good hardware can be a 2:1 difference for a company. But the difference between a company with superb programmers vs. average ones is 25:1, he says, adding, "That's probably … certainly the secret to my success. It's that we've gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people.""

http://www.fastcompany.com/1836987/steve-jobs-the-payoff-of-a-great-employee

This productivity speedup is the key observation. Learn the basics from coursera or whatever and then really internalize the idea that your personal productivity varies in orders of magnitude and learn to arrange your environment to avoid diminishing returns. After you have the ability to do this and you can communicate to nontechnical people, finding work is no problem.

This is a nicely written proposal for a practical, actionable idea. If you're not in tech, then you should consider doing this. It starts at a practical idea and has ways to branch out from the long term goal to other like including psychometrics and so forth.

I'm biased due to my open source project, but I think this is the kind of idea that fits well with cryptographically secure peer to peer systems that then aggregate into some groups, as the individual opinions are highly variable (correctly, as different brains need different training)

The problem with this is that multiple motivation systems contribute to action, and only one of them looks anything like "do the thing I expect will achieve my goals given what I believe about the world." For example, I wouldn't call a blind reflex a "choice" or "decision."

Phonons are the quanta of lattice vibration. Vibrations are one kind of imperfection in a lattice.

Electrical carriers (electrons and holes) do not scatter off of individual lattice atoms; they scatter off of lattice imperfections. These imperfections can be defects, or phonons, or other carriers.

On to the claims in the article... as before. Usefulness? I'm not really sure. If you're always using these nanotubes to carry currents, their entire environment will heat up (the heat will leak into them eventually), so it seems like it would only really help in cases where it needs to carry a current spike.

You could take a look at the 15 million statements in the database of the Never-Ending Language Learning project. The subset of beliefs for which human-supplied feedback exists and beliefs that have high-confidence truth values may be appropriate for your purpose.

roughly 50% likely to be true or false

I feel like you'd need to specify for what kind of person these statements shall appear about 50% likely. That can be very different across different knowledge backgrounds. I, as a European, have no idea whether or not Iowa and Ohio are neighboring states.

That said, I think geographical questions might do well because such statements should be easy to generate and find evidence for/against.

Examples:

• The Great Slave Lake is the 11th largest lake in the world
• Algeria is the 12th largest country in the world
• Israel is bigger than New Jersey
• Germany is smaller than Montana
• Sulawesi is one of the ten largest islands in the world

(some of these are false, some are true).

To create these statements, one could look up wikipedia lists, e.g.List of islands by area, List of countries by area, List of rivers by length and so on.

Writing a script that extracts statements from this type of data should be feasible, and one could write it such that for each true statement extracted, a wrong statement is created as well.

I find it very hard to judge these questions, however given a world map (without borders) this changes. Also, you could tell me how many people live in the countries/states mentioned, how large one of this countries is in absolute numbers or what the greatest depth of the Great Slave Lake and fifteen other lakes in the world is.

Once these statements are available, they could not only be used for calibration training, but also for exercises about seeking the truth in groups.