However hot your enthusiasm burns, you don't get to skip the "controlled study" part.

While I agree with some of what you're saying, it isn't like "cached thoughts" or many of Eliezer's other classics come with references to controlled studies, either. Like Robin Hanson pointed out in response to my own critique of evpsych:

claims can be "tested" via almost any connection they make with other claims that connect etc. to things we see. This is what intellectual exploration looks like.

No, Eby's article didn't have direct references to empirical work establishing the connection between PCT and akrasia, but it did build on enough existing work about PCT to make the connection plausible and easy to believe. If this were a peer-reviewed academic journal, that wouldn't be enough, and it'd have to be backed with experimental work. But I see no reason to require LW posts to adhere to the same standard as an academic journal - this is also a place to simply toss out interesting and plausible-seeming ideas, so that they can be discussed and examined and somebody can develop them further, up to the point of gathering that experimental evidence.