What will rationality look like in the future?

If a good rationalist could predict with reasonably high probability what methods good rationalists would use in 50-100 years, wouldn't said rationalist immediately update to use those methods now, invalidating his own prediction?

I have this dream where you have a supercomputer and you feed it all the world's academic papers and so forth and using a set of heuristics it highlights all the parts of the documents that have markers for various confusions, biases, and errors, then it ranks the documents according to some sort of rationality index, and traces all the connections through citations, etc, to produce a complete map of rationality in the sciences. You can immediately see where the clearest thinking is being done, drill down to discover the most rational researchers and even see highlighted sentences that display biases, confusions, errors, etc. All without a hint of intelligence.

There are lots of open social science-ish problems (e.g., optimal employee management, clinical psychology, effective political organizing, child raising). I expect that 50-100 years from now experts will have a much better grasp of the best responses to these problems, roughly in parallel to how experts have a better grasp of heart surgery than they did 50 years ago. Likewise, I expect public understanding of the solutions will be at the level of today's public understanding of heart surgery - the average reader of the New York Times knows the basics of what it is, why you'd do it, and has a very basic idea of problems that could arise (i.e. knows organ rejection is possible).

We'll probably have dealt with that akrasia thing.

Better computer support that encourages and allows more complete evaluation of alternatives.

The powers of instrumental rationality in the context of rapid technological progress and the inability/unwillingness of irrational people to listen to rational arguments strongly suggest the following scenario:

After realizing that turning a significant portion of the general population into rationalists would take much more time and resources than simply taking over the world, rationalists will create a global corporation with the goal of saving the humankind from the clutches of zero- and negative-sum status games.

Shortly afterwards, the Rational Megacorp will indeed take over the world and the people will get good government for the first time in the history of the human race (and will live happily ever after).

Interesting question... I'm sure with our BrainPals™ (as seen in John Scalzi's Old Man's War series) we can better quantify alternatives, as well as take more data into consideration. So, if someone on the street asks you for something, you "intuitively" sense that there's a 12% chance he wants to mug you, based on certain parameters. Of course, that's just improved applications of a known method.

Taking a step back, it's also interesting to see what will happen to rationalism in the general population -- are we becoming more rational over time? Or is it just something for a small group? I think that today the methods of rationality are at least available to more people (some of the smartest people in previous ages could have made good use of that!), but that doesn't mean humanity as a whole gets more rational.

Assuming no singularity/other game-changer?

If some specific projects (...Rationality Curriculum) become a success, rationality will be much more widespread and, as a result, much less defined.

And 50 years is a bit too much for any notable concentrations of probability.