Skill: Being strategic. I.e., life-consequentialism, where you actually do things based on their expected future consequences, as opposed to drifting into a PhD program because your friends are doing it.

Exercise materials: We either need to develop efficient probes for getting people to list out major life choices that they could actually remake (are under serious reconsideration) or we need to develop hypothetical life stories and policy decisions to use in exercises.

Rationality skill: Recognize rationality skill in others.

There is a strong tendency for people to use the heuristic, "P(Person X is right) = # of times person X has been observed to be right / # of statements person X has made", or worse, "(# statements by X - # of times X has admitted to making a mistake) / # statements by X".

This encourages people who want to be respected to do 4 bad things:

• Make many pronouncements on things that are obviously right, perhaps in a manner suggesting they are controversial claims.
• Avoid saying anything unless they are certain they are correct.
• Avoid saying anything concrete enough to possibly be proven wrong.
• Never, ever admit to having made a mistake.

Unfortunately, these methods are extremely effective.

Skill: Anti-rationalization (1): Prevent your mind from selectively searching for support of only one side of an argument.

Skill: negotiation - deliberately reaching a mutually beneficial trade or agreement, even in situations of slight power imbalance. Important for rationalists who aim at earning money as an instrumental goal.

(At the 5-second level a key component of this is learning to say "no", being able to overcome one's agreeableness as the default decision.)

(For some reason negotiation in situations of extreme power imbalance seems like it should have a different name, and I don't know what that should be.)

Because normal comments will inevitably get mixed up with those that satisfy the requested sort of post, I recommend you bold the words "Skill", "Subskill" and "Exercise".

Skill: Maintaining "contextual pointers" with your knowledge, both for the sake of evidential sourcing and contextual usage.

The idea here is twofold.

First, many intellectual conversations between people who lack this skill are are random walks through topic space. Each tangential leap is potentially useful for mining relevant evidence from each person's mind... but in conversations exploring an important central thesis it is good to treat the tangents as objects pushed onto a stack in the course of linear conversation. When you go to far afield with a tangent you need the presence of mind to notice that D was inspired by C which was inspired by B, which was profoundly relevant to the pragmatically important question of A. Stepping back to C or B or even A is frequently called for in important conversations but requires contextual mindfulness.

The second use of context is evidential. Being mindful of where evidence comes from (if it can be managed) helps keep track of the value and meaning of evidence. Confabulation induced or permitted by source amnesia, isn't necessarily a bad thing in terms of "usage optimized concepts" but in terms of epistemic hygiene its a killer. It is especially pernicious in modern media environments full of advertising, fiction, and bullshit.

I bring these two sorts of context up because they both involve "context pointers" and together the two kinds of context pointers enable clear "tree formatted thinking" where reasons radiate from a root node, and leaf nodes carry citations to allow validation.

Skill: Productivity/Munchkinism. Not giving up in pursuing a difficult worthwhile goal, always acting on the best available plan, including the search for a better one. Ability to convert additional time and resources into additional (if slow) optimization, as opposed to wasting them.

Subskill: Creativity, ability to generate new prototype ideas and refine them, modifying and combining known things to gradually reach into new territory.

Subskill: Scholarship, ability to collect ideas and skills from elsewhere, for future use as building blocks for your problem.

Subskill: Optimization of own activity. Creatively looking for better ways of doing things instead of only following a fixed routine. Improving effectiveness of the routine past the point of satisficing a "reasonable" level (where that's consequentialistically helpful).

Skill: An accurate and functional awareness of time.

By this I mean to include noticing that pre-established dates and times have arrived, predicting the amount of time things will take you or other people, not carrying through with schedules or plans inflexibly when real surprises should cause updates, understanding how to effectively communicate about time with people about time management in ways that respect the listener's time management skills, and so on.

some of these skills can be explained to a much younger audience (catch them young), in the form of stories, one such story made up for my daughter,

               As the Sun rose, the whole forest was filled with loud but sweet chatter of the squirrels chirping, as all the little ones were busy getting ready for school. Squeaky, the youngest among them, a very energetic and clever guy, was also gentle and kind, hence was adored by all the squirrels in the forest.

Squeaky enjoyed school very much and was always the first to get there. He loved what he learned each day and seeing his enthusiasm his parents gifted some chalk for him to practice his lessons at home. Squeaky was very happy and immediately set about scribbling on the trunk of the tree where his home was. That day in school, he was taught the number 'one', and his home tree was filled with that number. But soon there was a problem, “How could a little tree trunk be enough to hold all my knowledge?” wondered Squeaky. He thought about this and then decided to borrow the other trees in the forest for this purpose.

The next day he learned about 'two', and painted the whole forest, all the trees, including his neighbours with that number. When the other squirrels climbed their respective trees to get to their home, they were fully covered with chalk dust. And by the time they reached their destination, they looked like Eskimos. Thanks to Squeaky. Since, he was an adorable child, no one complained.

Every day the forest bore witness to Squeaky's expanding knowledge, one day it was 'three' and the next day it would be filled with 'four'. As Squeaky's knowledge was near 'three hundred and twenty six', the whole colony shuddered to think of the days ahead. They did not want in the future to start as a squirrel at the base of their tree and end up at the top as an Eskimo.

So, they sought the help of an wise old Owl, who thought about it for a moment and said, "Each one of you should gift different coloured chalks to Squeaky and before he could use it, ask him to come and see me". They all were perplexed, "Is this some kind of ZEN thing, the solution to a problem is more of the same problem?" they whispered amongst themselves, but nevertheless decided to implement the Owl's idea. "It would at-least be a change from the usual white", bought a chorus laughter from the crowd. "See you tomorrow covered in red" giggled one. "Hope some one gives him blue, I would look good in blue" wondered another.

The next day to Squeaky's surprise, all his neighbours gave him chalks of different colours, for his use. But they said there was a catch; he should first go and see the wise old Owl and follow his instructions if he wants to use them.

Squeaky went to the Owl and introduced himself. The Owl said “ I want you to write about the things you do-not-know, so that I can teach them to you”. This was music to his ears. Now he had a mentor. He thanked the Owl and promised to start from tomorrow.

The next morning when Squeaky was about to begin, he thought about the Owl's instruction and as the chalk touched the trunk, he was filled with a strange feeling. He had never felt this way before and an uneasy calm settled on him. His mind was blank. He wondered, 'What do I do-not-know?'. He was rather clueless.

Squeaky sat down to think, could not think of things he did not know and whatever he thought, he knew. Slowly, the seconds ticked to minutes, and minutes to hours, hours to days, but still there was no progress. All the squirrels heaved a sigh of relief but at the same time felt sorry, as it was rather a mean trick to play on the little fella and in the mean time the forest came back to its original colour.

(As Squeaky is not very good at knowing what he does not know, and you children being so much smarter, can you think about what you do-not-know. Can you?)

more of my effort to teach rationality skills to my daughter can be found at this address, http://bpsundar.weebly.com

Skill: Distill yourself to simple terms. Be funny and interesting.

Exercise:

• Have list of topics. Select one using a random number generator. Or use random ANKI cards. Whatever.

• Immediately after selecting, turn on your digital camera/computer camera and record.

• You can aim for lots of different goals: tell an interesting story, give a short two-sentence answer, etc.

This is great for preparing for job interviews also.

Exercise: Improv (improvised comedy).

Skill: Mindfulness / not doing things on autopilot.

An underlying capacity that seems worth exercises to train explicitly, if we can figure out how to do that.