If rationality is purely winning there is a minimal shared art

I think you've subtly misinterpreted each of the virtues (not that I think in terms the twelve-virtue list is special; they're just twelve good aspects of rational thought).

The virtues apply to your mental process for parsing and making predictions about the world. They don't exactly match the real-world usages of these terms.

Consider these in the context of winning a game. Let's talk about a real-world game with social elements, to make it harder, rather than something like chess. How about "Suppose you're a small business owner. How do you beat the competition?"

1) Curiosity: refers to the fact that you should be willing to consider new theories, or theories at all instead of intuition. You're willing to consider, say, that "customers return more often if you make a point to be more polite". The arational business owner might lose because they think they treat people perfectly fine, and don't consider changing their behavior.

2-4) Relinquishment/lightness/evenness refers to letting your beliefs be swayed by the evidence, without personal bias. In your example: seeing a woman appear to be cut in half absolutely does not cause you to think she's actually cut in half. That theory remains highly unlikely. But it does mean that you have to reject theories that don't allow the appearance of that, and go looking for a more likely explanation. (If you inspect the whole system in detail and come up with nothing, maybe she was actually cut in half! But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, so you better ask everyone you know, and leave some other very extreme theories (such as 'it's all CGI') as valid, as well.)

In my example, the rational business-owner acts more polite to see if it helps retain customers, and correctly (read: mathematically or pseudo-mathematically) interprets the results, being convinced only if they are truly convincing, and unconvinced if they are truly not. The arational business owner doesn't check, or does and massages the results to fit what they wanted to see, or ignores the results, or disbelieves the results because they don't match their expectations. And loses.

5) Argument - if you don't believe that changing your behavior retains customers, and your business partner or employee says they do, do you listen? What if they make a compelling case? The arational owner ignores them, still trusting their own intuition. The rational owner pays attention and is willing to be convinced - or convince them of the opposite, if there's evidence enough to do so. Argument is on the list because it's how two fallible but truth-seeking parties find common truth and check reasoning. Not because arguing is just Generally A Good Idea. It's often not.

6) Empiricism - this is about debating results, not words. It's not about collecting data. Collecting data might be a good play, or it might not. Depends on the situation. But it's still in the scope of rationalism to evaluate whether it is or not.

7) Simplicity - this doesn't mean "pick simple strategies in life". This means "prefer simple explanations over complex ones". If you lower your prices and it's a Monday and you get more sales, you prefer the lower prices explanation over "people buy more on Mondays" because it's simpler - it doesn't assume invisible, weird forces; it makes more sense without a more complex model of the world. But you can always pursue the conclusion further if you need to. It could still be wrong.

8) Humility - refers to being internally willing to be fallible. Not to the social trait of humility. Your rational decision making can be humble even if you come across, socially, as the least humble person anyone knows. The humble business owner realizes they've made a mistake with a new policy and reverses it because not doing so is a worse play. The arational business owner keeps going when the evidence is against them because they still trust their initial calculation when later evidence disagrees.

9-10) Perfectionism/Precision: if it is true that in social games you don't need to be perfect, just better than others, then "perfect play" is maximizing P(your score is better than others), not maximizing E(your score). You can always try to play better, but you have to play the right game.

And if committing N resources to something gets a good chance of winning, while committing N+1 gets a better chance but has negative effects on your life in other ways (say, your mental health), then it can be the right play to commit only N. Perfect and precise play is about the larger game of your life, not the current game. The best play in the current game might be imperfect and imprecise, and that's fine.

11) Scholarship - certainly it doesn't always make sense when weighed against other things. Until it does. The person on the poverty line who learns more when they have time gains powers the others don't have. It may unlock doors out that others can't access. As with everything else, it must be weighed against the other exigencies of their life.

(Also, by the way, I'm not sure what your title means. Maybe rephrase it?)

All the virtues makes sense when the context is trying to figure out something very hard and important with other people who are also trying to figure out the same thing

Indeed, without honestly trying to solve an important problem, knowing about biases can hurt people. (Technically, the problem doesn't have to be important, but with unimportant people are even more likely to optimize for things other than solving the problem.)

What art covers working on your farm close to starvation and also trying to figure out artificial intelligence's impact on the world?

That would be the art of non-self-destruction.

I have never thought of the twelve virtues as representative of what I think rationality is, and I've never heard anyone seriously defend them. They were written in a different time and for a different context than the one we're in.

I think the phrase "the art of rationality" points to something coherent and large, and that "winning" or even "systematized winning" is not a good description of it. Winning is at best a diagnostic. I think a better description is something like this: we live in a world we were never intended to inhabit. There are challenges we face now that are totally unlike the challenges our ancestors faced and were selected for facing. The fact that we can do anything about this is pretty amazing, but we can probably do a lot better than what we do by default, by inventing and learning mental motions and patterns of mental motions our ancestors never needed, suited to our new environment (in the same way that parkour consists of physical motions our ancestors never needed, suited to the new environment of the urban jungle).

Late me take the old favourite

Should be "let", I think?

close the starvation and also

close "to" starvation?

Hm, you bring up a valid point about how the 12 virtues as listed don't really correspond with directly solving a lot of practical (EX: farm problems).

I think that's okay. For the most part, I think about instrumental rationality as applied cognitive science in the CFAR-esque vein, where utilizing research in habits and motivation can have nice flow-through effects / higher applicability across multiple sectors.

TAPs, for example, can help people remember to do things, regardless of context.

I think you're advocating for moving more towards a specific problem context so that we can discuss common problems? (So that solutions are more applicable to the group?)

I think that a lot of the LW/rationality value, though does come from these sort of higher-level things, where we can apply them to lots of contexts.