Start with minimal knowledge. Everything you read seems plausible.
Try stuff, keep track of your results. Form hypotheses, and seek new information being slightly more skeptical and discerning than before.
Repeat 2 until 99% of what you read is crap.
Follow the 1% advice, but you already know what you’re doing by that point, anyway. Diminishing returns.
It’s really hard to tell good from bad when you don’t have the domain knowledge. You have to acquire a little bit by luck/accident, and then you start iterating.
This worked for me re: diet, meditation protocol, exercise protocol, time management, goal management, existential suffering, and much more. (Some are pretty steady state, others are still changing, and the steady state stuff may change if it stops working—which means my knowledge is incomplete, and more iteration is required.)
Shinzen Young’s “Do Nothing” Meditation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ6cdIaUZCA (Note that he is “neuroscience aware.”)
http://www.shinzen.org/Retreat%20Reading/FiveWays.pdf
http://www.basicmindfulness.org/
(Also the discussion of “Willingness” in http://www.amazon.com/Acceptance-Commitment-Therapy-Second-Edition/dp/1609189620/)
The goal is to raise the baseline of equanimity and mindfulness. You naturally start allowing emotion and inner talk to thunder through you without letting it drive behavior. This is a prerequisite for rational deliberation and choice under increasingly emotional situations. Maybe.