I don’t know exactly what you mean by “ridiculously stupid decision-making that most people do”, but are you sure it’s something that should be solved with x-rationality as opposed to normal rationality?
I’m sure it’s something that could be helped with techniques like The Bottom Line, which most intelligent, science-literate, trying to be “rational” people mostly don’t do nearly enough of. Also something that could be helped by paying attention to which thinking techniques lead to what kinds of results, and learning the better ones. Dojos could totally teach these practices, and help their students actually incorporate them into their day-to-day, reflexive decison-making (at least more than most “intelligent, science-literate” people do now; most people hardly try at all). As to heuristics and biases, and probability theory… I do find those helpful. Essential for thinking usefully about existential risk; helpful but non-essential for day to day inference, according to my mental but not written (I’ve been keeping a written record lately, but not for long enough, and not systematically enough) observations. The probability theory in particular may be hard to teach to people who don’t easily think about math, though not impossible. But I don’t think building an art of rationality needs to be solely about the heuristics and biases literature. Certainly much of the rationality improvement I’ve gotten from OB/LW isn’t that.
I’m sure it’s something that could be helped with techniques like The Bottom Line, which most intelligent, science-literate, trying to be “rational” people mostly don’t do nearly enough of. Also something that could be helped by paying attention to which thinking techniques lead to what kinds of results, and learning the better ones. Dojos could totally teach these practices, and help their students actually incorporate them into their day-to-day, reflexive decison-making (at least more than most “intelligent, science-literate” people do now; most people hardly try at all). As to heuristics and biases, and probability theory… I do find those helpful. Essential for thinking usefully about existential risk; helpful but non-essential for day to day inference, according to my mental but not written (I’ve been keeping a written record lately, but not for long enough, and not systematically enough) observations. The probability theory in particular may be hard to teach to people who don’t easily think about math, though not impossible. But I don’t think building an art of rationality needs to be solely about the heuristics and biases literature. Certainly much of the rationality improvement I’ve gotten from OB/LW isn’t that.