Three things that helped my reasoning skills and rationality: - programming / applied maths; - being forced to memorise ~20 logical fallacies in high school;

Three things that helped my reasoning skills and rationality: - programming / applied maths; - being forced to memorise ~20 logical fallacies in high school; - growing the hell up and learning that being right just doesn't matter. The third point was the most important. As a child / teenager, I always wanted to win discussions. Even if I knew I was wrong, I'd use every trick in the book to try and win an argument nonetheless. Then, I started studying computer science and I met a lot of highly neurotic people who wanted to be right no matter what. I obviously found them extremely annoying before I realised I was in fact one of them. The very words you use ("You see the many flaws of the enemy camp and don't see as many in your own") are the ones I now try to avoid at all times, because viewing the other as the enemy is what really messed up my reasoning skills. Learning to treat a discussion as a genuine learning opportunity has been a huge blessing for me.