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patrissimo comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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I'm disappointed at how few of these comments, particularly the highly-voted ones, are about proposed solutions, or at least proposed areas for research. My general concern about the LW community is that it seems much more interested in the fun of debating and analyzing biases, rather than the boring repetitive trial-and-error of correcting them.
Anna's post lays out a particular piece of poor performance which is of core strategic value to pretty much everyone - how to identify and achieve your goals - and which, according to me and many people and authors, can be greatly improved through study and practice. So I'm very frustrated by all the comments about the fact that we're just barely intelligent and debates about the intelligence of the general person. It's like if Eliezer posted about the potential for AI to kill us all and people debated how they would choose to kill us instead of how to stop it from happening.
Sorry, folks, but compared to the self-help/self-development community, Less Wrong is currently UTTERLY LOSING at self-improvement and life optimization. Go spend an hour reading Merlin Mann's site and you'll learn way more instrumental rationality than you do here. Or take a GTD class, or read a top-rated time-management book on Amazon.
Talking about biases is fun, working on them is hard. Do Less Wrongers want to have fun, or become super-powerful and take over (or at least save) the world? So far, as far as I can tell, LW is much worse than the Quantified Self & time/attention-management communities (Merlin Mann, Zen Habits, GTD) at practical self-improvement. Which is why I don't read it very often. When it becomes a rationality dojo instead of a club for people who like to geek out about biases, I'm in.
Interestingly, the people who seem most interested in the topic of instrumental rationality never seem to write a lot of posts here, compared to the people interested in epistemic rationality. Maybe that's because you're too busy "doing" to teach (or to ask good open questions), but I'm confident that's not true of all the I-Rationality crowd.
Of course, as an academic, I'm perfectly happy staying on the E-Rationality side.
I think there is definitely some of that, and I've heard that from other LW "fringers" like myself - people who love the concept of rationality and support the philosophy of LW, but have no time to write posts because their lives are full to the brim with awesome projects.
One problem, i think, is that teaching and writing things up well/usefully is work. I spend time reading and writing blogs, and I do that in my "fun time" because it is fun. Careful writing about practical rationality would be work and come out of my work time, and my work time is very very full. Which suggests that to advance, we need people whose job it is to do this work. Which is part of what we see in the self-improvement world - people get paid to write books and run workshops, and while there is lots of crap out there generally the result is higher quality and more useful material.