You seem to restrict “rationality technique” here to “methods for thinking hard”.
But there are others things one can do. If the topic you are interested in might have a lot of prior research, it can be useful to find and read that research, since you are unlikely to singlehandedly outcompete the work of dozens of other researchers who came before. Better stand on the shoulders of giants than to climb on a stool you made yourself. Or, rather, it’s of course the best when you do both to some degree. I’m not sure what the proportion should be.
The problem with reading lots of research is similar to thinking hard. It is difficult to motivate yourself to do it. In particular, research papers can be very difficult and boring. But they become much easier after you read a few. Those people are also just cooking with water.
In general, everyone knows how to use Google to find info. But for research I particularly recommend search engines for papers. Namely
scholar.google.com and semanticscholar.org. Each has some papers the other hasn’t, so both might be worth a try, although I mainly use the first. In any case, those websites let you explore “related” or “similar” papers, or papers who cite a particular paper. The weakness of those search engines is that they mostly only cite single journal entries or similar, but book chapters are largely missing.
Of course I might be off track here. Perhaps you want to think about stuff that isn’t covered by research. For example, about what to do / choose in some difficult decision situation. Here, other things might help, besides thinking hard. Writing down pros and cons for example.
You seem to restrict “rationality technique” here to “methods for thinking hard”.
But there are others things one can do. If the topic you are interested in might have a lot of prior research, it can be useful to find and read that research, since you are unlikely to singlehandedly outcompete the work of dozens of other researchers who came before. Better stand on the shoulders of giants than to climb on a stool you made yourself. Or, rather, it’s of course the best when you do both to some degree. I’m not sure what the proportion should be.
The problem with reading lots of research is similar to thinking hard. It is difficult to motivate yourself to do it. In particular, research papers can be very difficult and boring. But they become much easier after you read a few. Those people are also just cooking with water.
In general, everyone knows how to use Google to find info. But for research I particularly recommend search engines for papers. Namely scholar.google.com and semanticscholar.org. Each has some papers the other hasn’t, so both might be worth a try, although I mainly use the first. In any case, those websites let you explore “related” or “similar” papers, or papers who cite a particular paper. The weakness of those search engines is that they mostly only cite single journal entries or similar, but book chapters are largely missing.
Of course I might be off track here. Perhaps you want to think about stuff that isn’t covered by research. For example, about what to do / choose in some difficult decision situation. Here, other things might help, besides thinking hard. Writing down pros and cons for example.