I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)
At this point, my Expectancy for positive results from single changes like "just use a trainer at the gym" has hit essentially zero - I've tried all sorts of stuff, nothing ever fucking works - so I'm not willing to spend the incremental money. If I have a lot of money to spend, I'll try throwing a higher level of money at all aspects of the problem - get a trainer on weights, try the latest fad of "short interval bursts" for aerobic exercise, get LASIK and a big TV and a separate room of the apartment to make exercising less unpleasant (no, dears, I don't get any endorphins whatsoever), buy a wide variety of grass-fed organic meats and take one last shot at the paleo diet again, and... actually I think that's most of what I'd do. That way I'd be able to scrape up enough hope to make it worth a shot. Trying one item from that list doesn't seem worth the bother.
I did try Shangri-La again when Seth Roberts contacted me personally and asked me to take another shot. It was just wearing tight, uncomfortable noseplugs while eating all my food and clearing out time at night to make sure I took oil 1 hour away from eating any other food or brushing my teeth, a trivial inconvenience when I'd walk over broken glass to lose weight. I lost 20 pounds and then despite trying out around 10 different things Seth Roberts said to do, my weight slowly started creeping up again, and when after a while I gave up and stopped taking the oil to see what would happen, there was no change in the behavior of my weight - the same slow creep. It's clear that Shangri-La worked initially but then, contrary to all theory, it just mysteriously stopped working. So far I've gained 10 of those 20 pounds back, in accordance with the one truly reliable law of dietary science: 95% of the people who manage to lose weight put it back on shortly thereafter. BTW, exercise didn't lead me to lose any weight whatsoever, even when combined with an attempt at the paleo diet (albeit not one that spent lots of money, or involved a personal trainer).
So far as I can tell, all the advice here is from metabolically privileged folks who don't know they're metabolically privileged and don't comprehend the nothing fucking works phenomenon that obtains if you're not metabolically privileged.
If you want to give advice, that's fine. Don't tell me how well it's going to work or how easy it's going to be; that just tells me you're clueless.
Frankly, I'm surprised that this "Shangri-La" approach is taken seriously by you and other people here on LW. I do believe that it has worked for many people, but this looks exactly like the sort of problem where placebo should be very effective on average. On the other hand, Roberts's theories about it don't even sound like a good just-so story.