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Consider the difference between a pub and a gym.
You go to a pub with your rationalist friends to:
You go to a gym to:
One key distinction here is effort.
Going to a bar is low effort. Going to a gym is high effort.
In fact, going to gym requires such a high effort that most people have a constant nagging guilt about doing it. They proceed to set up accountability systems with others, hire personal trainers, use habit installer apps, buy gym memberships as commitment devices, use clever hacks to always have their gym bag packed and ready to go, introspect on their feelings off anxiety about it and try to find work-arounds or sports which suit them, and so forth...
People know gyms are usually a schlep, yet they also know going there is important, so they accept that they'll have to try really hard to build systems which get them exercising.
However, things seem different for rationality. I've often heard people go "this rationality stuff doesn't seem very effective, people just read some blog posts and go to a workshop or two, but don't really seem more effective than other mortals".
But we wouldn't be surprised if someone said "this fitness stuff doesn't seem very effective, some of my friends just read some physiology bloggers and then went to a 5-day calisthenics bootcamp once, but they're not in good shape at all". Of course they aren't!
I think I want to suggest two improvements:
1) On the margin, we should push more for a cultural norm of deliberate practice in the art of rationality.
It should be natural to get together with your friends once a week and use OpenPhil's calibration app, do Thinking Physics problems, practice CFAR techniques, etc...
2) But primarily: we build gyms.
Gyms are places where hundreds of millions of dollars of research have gone into designing equipment specifically allowing you to exercise certain muscles. There are also changing rooms to help you get ready, norms around how much you talk (or not) to help people focus, personal trainers who can give you advice, saunas and showers to help you relax afterwards...
For rationality, we basically have nothing like this [1]. Each time you want to practice rationality, you basically have to start by inventing your own exercises.
[1] The only example I know of is Kocherga, which seems great. But I don't know a lot about what they're doing, and ideally which should have rationality gyms either online or in every major hub, not just Moscow.
My main issue with "need" isn't really that it's strong, but that I predict it's often misunderstood; people use it for all different levels of strength.
Fair point about the Sunday sermon thing. Some religious groups though do encourage lots of practice in religious settings though. (Like prayer in Islam)
What it says on the tin.