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jtolds comments on Humans are not automatically strategic - Less Wrong
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Instrumental rationality is one of my primary interests here, but I don't post much -- the standard here is too high. All I have to offer is personal anecdotal evidence about various self-help / anti-akrasia techniques I tried on myself, and I always feel a bit guilty when posting them because unsubstantiated other-optimizing is officially frowned upon here. Attempting to extract any deep wisdom from these anecdotes would be generalizing from one example.
An acceptable way to post self-help on LW would be in the form of properly designed, properly conducted long-term studies of self-help techniques. However, designing and conducting such studies is a full-time job which ideally requires a degree in experimental psychology.
If that's true, we absolutely need to lower the bar for such posts. Three good sorts of posts that are not terribly difficult are: (1) a review of a good self-help book and what you personally took from it; (2) a few-sentence summary of an academic study on an income-boosting technique, a method for improving your driving safety, or other useful content, with a link to the same; or (3) a description of self-intervention you tried and tracked impacts from, quantified self style.
When someone says they have anecdotes but want data, I hear an opportunity for crowdsourcing.
Perhaps a community blog is the wrong tool for this? What if we had a tool that supported tracking rationalist intervention efficacy? People could post specific interventions and others could report their personal results. Then the tool would allow for sorting interventions by reported aggregate efficacy. Maybe even just a simple voting system?
That seems like it could be a killer app for lowering the bar toward encouraging newcomers and data-poor interventions from getting posted and evaluated.