Test Driven Thinking

This is an interesting restatement of beliefs paying rent - in order to qualify as a useful belief to hold, it must be testable. And if it's testable, you should test it.

For predictions there are e.g. predictionbook or foresightexchange.

Maybe the programming analogy can be pushed forward by applying pair programming: Make the test a cooperative thing by mutually 'running' your tests. This is also suggested byOthers' predictions of your performance are usually more accurate and Bet Your Friends to Be More Right.

Your description of TDD is slightly incomplete: the steps include, after writing the test, running the test when you expect it to fail. The idea being that if it doesn't fail, you have either written an ineffective test (this is more likely than one might think) or the code under test actually already handles that case.

Then you write the code (as little code as needed) and confirm that the test passes where it didn't before to validate that work.

I work in software, and the hardest part is explaining to people that until you finish a test plan your requirements are incomplete.

I can see two interpretations.

In one, this is equivalent to

• Write down your forecasts and explicitly list reasons for your predictions
• Check whether the forecast was correct
• If it was not, re-evaluate the reasons listed in step 1.

In the other, this is just an internal consistency check: if you believe A, B, and C, make sure they can co-exist and do not contradict each other.

TDD is a declarative/generative process: you describe first what you want, then tell the computer how to achieve it, then test that against your initial requirement.

WRT rationality, this cannot be taken literally because you cannot generate reality, unless it's something of a goal setting. In this case it would be akin to writing a smart goal: how would you know if you have achieved it?
But in case of beliefs about reality, the only test you can do is: how does my model matches reality?
As Lumifer pointed out though, there's no simple way to check beliefs against a simple test, which gives you only true/false information. For basically all interesting belief, you need to use probabilities and test using a Bayesian framework.

For predictions regarding stock exchanges it is possible to state your expectations in form of ranges over time and you will be informed when these ranges are left. It seems straightforward to extend this to more xomplex conditions.

That seems like a job for an expert system - using formal reasoning from premises (as long as you can translate them comfortably into symbols), identifying whether a new fact contradicts any old fact...

What exactly separates this from general critical thinking?

Am I correct to rephrase your idea as "People should develop a habit to apply reductio ad absurdum and, to some extent, absurdity heuristic more often"?