I'll try to summarize the positions by taking (IMO) the most representative paragraph from each one.
1) Yvain:
The technique I decided to test was to write out an oath detailing exactly what I wanted to do, list in nauseating detail all of the conditions under which I could or could not be released from this oath, and then bind myself to it, with the knowledge that if I succeeded I would have a great method of self-improvement and if I failed I would be dooming myself to a life of laziness forever.
2) Z_M_Davis:
Rather than setting explicit measurable goals, I try to continually remind myself that every minute and every dime is precious, and every minute and every dime that you don't spend doing the best thing you can possibly be doing is a mark of sin upon your soul.
3) pjeby:
If you explicitly contemplate all the things that might come up, and decide what you'll do in each case, then you are mentally linking your "interest" to those contexts, along with a preferred behavior... thus reducing the willpower load required to make those decisions when the time comes, and giving that "interest" a larger say in the bargaining that occurs at that point in time.
Now we need to understand what implications those positions have and where they contradict.
A next step in setting up a decent experiment would be to select 4 groups (1, 2, 3 + Control) of people randomly. To give findings most applicable to rational people, we can just as well select within LW.
Another step: Select a common task the utility of which is perceived as high by most people on LW, yet which is seldomly performed.
Proposal: During two weeks, run for (at least) 10 Minutes on three of each four consecutive days.
Ideally, the experiment would then continue with another task, but switching group members. This improves the experiment via contr...
It seems to me that this blog has just reached it's first real crisis.
Three people are announcing three apparently opposed beliefs with substantial real expected consequences and yet no-one has yet spoken, or it seems to me implied, the key slogan... "LETS USE SCIENCE!" or, as hubristic Bayesian wannabes, not invoked Bayes as an idol to swear by, but rather said "LETS USE HUMANE REFLECTIVE DECISION THEORY, THE QUANTITATIVELY UNKNOWN BUT QUALITATIVELY INTUITED POWER DEEPER THAN SCIENCE FROM WHICH IT STEMS AND TO WHICH OUR COMMUNITY IS DEVOTED".
IF RDS was applied to our current situation, people would be analyzing Yvain's, Davis' and Eby's proposals, working out exactly what their implications are, and trying to propose, in the name of SCIENCE, hypotheses which will distinguish between them, and in the name of BAYES, confidence estimates of their analyses and of the quality with which the denotations of their words have cleaved reality at the joints enabling an odds ratio of updating to be extracted from a single data point. People would be working out what features of which of the models used by Yvain, Davis and Eby constitute evidence against what other features. They would be trying to evaluate non-verbally, through subjectively opaque but known-to-be-informative processes vulnerable to verbal overshadowing, what relative odds to place on those different features of the models. Finally, they would be examining the expected costs entailed by experiments being proposed and selecting those experiments which promise to provide the most information for the least cost be performed. The cost estimate would include both the effort required to perform the experiments, probably best assessed with an outside view in most cases like these, and the dangers to the minds of the participants from possible adverse outcomes, taking into account, as well as possible, the structural uncertainty of the models.
I sincerely hope to see some of that in the comments section soon, either under this post or the "Applied Picoeconomics" post.