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Alicorn comments on The Spotlight - Less Wrong
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Personal experience suggests this is freakishly hard without a lot of practice, which can mostly be obtained by writing up your introspection for public consumption and getting good, honest feedback. This typically results in improved writing skill. (I can't say for sure it directly results in introspective skill if you're not doing it primarily with that purpose in mind.)
I'd be genuinely curious to know, did that come easy for you before you started writing for an audience?
I'll hazard one reason why the later posts in your sequence are maybe not having as much success as you were expecting: as I see it, you're failing to follow through on an implicit promise made by the introductory post, which stated "I've made it a project to increase my luminosity as much as possible", implying that you would be recounting personal experience with these various tools.
The Grue post had some personal insights, such as that you hate surprises. Let There Be Light had some tips from personal experience. The ABCs had none, and used mostly the "you" form for introducing examples. It's something of a paradox for a sequence on luminosity to disclose so little about yourself.
I have actually not included any insights about myself that came as a result of my luminosity project. My hatred of surprises, for instance, was manifestly obvious; only the exact mental background, which I did not publicly disclose in the post, was dug up when I started introspecting seriously. The trouble with including personal disclosure is that it would feel uncomfortably like bragging to advertise things I like about myself; meanwhile, things I don't like about myself tend to be obsolete by the time I've properly understood them because I can fix them, and the ones I can't or haven't fixed yet wouldn't be very good advertising ("I discovered I have the following nasty trait which is still there, and you can too!").
In the interest of disclosure, I will brag some:
I have raised my happiness set point. This requires some maintenance work, but at a "neutral" time now I am happier than I was at a "neutral" time five years ago.
When I identify a mood as being non-endorsed, decidedly useless, and unpleasant, I can often simply get rid of it. This takes a few moments now, although if I leave them to fester too long it can require a night's sleep.
I can, with some concerted effort, enforce my desire to like certain people (whether this be for comfort reasons, i.e. I'll have to be around them a lot, or for practical reasons, i.e. it would be instrumental to befriend them). This is more difficult with some people than others but I have yet to try very hard to like someone without being able to sincerely do it.
So, this comment looks kinda popular. What do people think of my writing a sequence followup with a more detailed look at the above "success stories" from my own project? I'm skeptical of it being very instrumentally useful, since I think lots of it is idiosyncratic, but if it'd be useful to present myself as a toy example for people to anchor the ideas to, I'm willing.
<0.05 effort units spent on this comment> I think it would be interesting, regardless of whether it's useful. I'd also like to hear about some non-success stories. It's good to know what to avoid or the limits of one's tools as well.