The concept "achieving your values" doesn't deserve the term "instrumental rationality". If it does, then, as you point out, works about instrumental rationality are merely works about how to do stuff. You're giving a fancy new name to an old concept.
ETA: Not that that's always exactly what we mean when we say "instrumental rationality", of course ...
How about the given definition of "epistemic rationality"? This is also really general: it's how to know stuff. Granted, that's precisely what being less wrong means, but we're not interested in general education. Granted again, the top-rated post of all time, "Generalizing From One Example", is definitely epistemic rationality but not obviously any other type of rationality.
So, here I propose some other definitions of "rationality":
Aumann rationality: a person is Aumann rational if they are rational (don't interpret this circularly!), they believe other people are Aumann rational, and other people believe they are Aumann rational. Perfect Aumann rationality causes people to never disagree with each other, but it's a spectrum. Eliezer Yudkowsky is relatively Aumann rational; people on Less Wrong are expected to be quite Aumann rational with each other; people in political debates have very little Aumann rationality.
Rational neutrality: though people who are rational-neutral discard evidence regarding statements, as any intelligent being must, their decision whether to discard a piece of evidence or not is not based on the direction/magnitude of it--if they ignore an observation, they do so without first seeing what it is.
Krasia: quite unrelated to any other type of rationality, people with high krasia are good at going from believing that an action would result in high expected utility to actually taking that action.
people on Less Wrong are expected to be quite Aumann rational with each other
I expect that anyone who expected this has already been quite disappointed. ;-)
I have a problem: I'm not sure what this community is about.
To illustrate, recently I've been experimenting with a number of tricks to overcome my akrasia. This morning, a succession of thoughts struck me:
Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that we have a two-fold definition of rationality:
If this community was only about epistemic rationality, there would be no problem. Akrasia isn't related to epistemic rationality, and neither are most self-help tricks. Case closed.
However, by including instrumental rationality, we have expanded the sphere of potential topics to cover practically anything. Productivity tips, seduction techniques, the best ways for grooming your physical appearance, the most effective ways to relax (and by extension, listing the best movies / books / video games of all time), how you can most effectively combine different rebate coupons and where you can get them from... all of those can be useful in achieving your values.
Expanding our focus isn't necessarily a bad thing, by itself. It will allow us to attract a wider audience, and some of the people who then get drawn here might afterwards also become interested in e-rationality. And many of us would probably find the new kinds of discussions useful in their personal lives. The problem, of course, is that epistemic rationality is a relatively narrow subset of instrumental rationality - if we allow all instrumental rationality topics, we'll be drowned in them, and might soon lose our original focus entirely.
There are several different approaches as far as I can see (as well as others I can't see):
I honestly don't know which approach would be the best. Do any of you?