If you haven't seen the video of a wet towel being wrung out in space yet, it provides a great opportunity to test some basic rationality skills.
Skill #1: Notice the opportunity. (I failed this test. I had a fuzzy, wrong idea about what would happen. I didn't notice the fuzziness of my own thinking until after I watched the video, when it was too late to apply basic rationality skills. I'll never know if I could have made a correct prediction.)
Skill #2: Enumerate possibilities.
Skill #3: Incorporate prior information.
Skill #4: Making clear predictions.
Skill #5: Understanding why/how your prediction failed/succeeded.
Skill #6: There may be some things you predicted and some you didn't. Don't forget to notice the partial failures along with the partial success.
Experiment:
You are on the International Space Station. You get a towel soaking wet, then you wring it out. What happens?
If you haven't seen it, don't scroll into the comments.
Don't click the link until you've thought about it!
Some possibilities: it jets out in one direction, little droplets radiate outwards from all over, there are a bunch of miniature streams going in all directions, there are sorts of sheets of water radiating outward that split into droplets, it does any of these things at a rapid or very slow rate, the water doesn't leave at all
Reasoning: when I wring out a towel it usually all leaves in one big thing, then drips from all over. Does it all leave through one "faucet" because that's where the pressure is or because it's the lowest point? I've never paid too close attention to it, but I think it typically leaves from the bottom, which would imply that gravity's doing the work of choosing that one exit point. With the dripping off it's unclear whether the drops would just cling to the towel in the absence of gravity. It may be that the whole thing depends on the extra oomph of gravity; if when I wring out my towel it all leaves from the lowest spot (although again, I'm not sure of that,) then presumably the pressure prior to its getting there isn't enough to make it exit. All of this leans towards less water exiting than otherwise, and maybe not from all the same place, and (of course) slower than before. So my guess would be something like little droplets slowly radiating out from all over but not as much water leaving as before, unless it gets wrung really tight.
Meta reasoning: you were much more likely to post this if it was cool and/or surprising. The most intuitively cool and/or surprising things (that are still plausible according to the above thinking) would be if it all left as a sort of sheet or bubble of if none (or at least very little) left, or maybe if the sheet or bubble arrived but only after a lot of wringing. On the second thought, towels are pretty irregular surfaces, so I wouldn't expect a smooth sheet to radiate out from it. So my official guess is that very little will leave from it until it has been wrung very tightly, and then a bunch will surprisingly burst out.
~WATCHING THE VIDEO~
Hey, that was cool! I guess I was sort of right - water mostly didn't exit the towel, but I didn't predict (correctly, in my head, or explicitly, in the post above) what it would look like as it was not exiting the towel, and I was more dramatically incorrect about it all bursting out. The features I hadn't thought about were the clumpiness of the water and the way water looks like when it's about to fall from a towel but is still clinging - visibly on the surface, not hiding within the folds. I also think that if I had correctly predicted what it would look like I wouldn't have predicted the burst from the meta-reasoning, because the towel being shrunk in within the water was already cool-looking. When I predicted that something cool would happen, I suspect I should have thought through my reasoning earlier and seen at what points there was an opportunity for something cool to occur - which is a point that might be more broadly applicable. To remember the surface tension stuff I should have tried to remember mechanical features of water in general, like why droplets form in the first place and so on, rather than jumping into directly imagining how wringing out a towel looks like and reasoning from there. Broader lesson there, obviously not a new one, but perhaps one I should be better about keeping in mind: appeals to first principles are relatively more important when dealing with novel situations.