Voted up for entertainingly, clearly, and concisely summarizing many applications of knowledge about many biases.

How long do you think it should take to solve a major problem if you are not wasting any time? Everything written above was created in a sum total of one hour of work. How many of these ideas had never even occurred to us before we sat down and thought about it for five minutes?

Woh, woh, slow down, please. Do you mean to say that you became aware of biases, internalized your belief in their importance, gathered the relevant info, became familiar with LW norms about style and tone, and wrote the article, all in one hour? Even if you did, do you mean to imply that you thereby solved a major problem? Because it seems to me that psychologists, cognitive scientists, and to a lesser extent the LW community have described a major problem -- human biases -- which is still largely unsolved in the sense that it continues to annoy and befuddle even people at the 99th percentile of rationality. By summarizing that problem (however aptly) you have not even done the work of observing and describing it, let alone solving it.

Take five minutes right now and write down what areas of your life you could optimize to make the biggest difference. You know what to do from there. This is the power of rationality.

That works the first 200 times, but at a certain point the low-hanging fruit is gone and the suboptimal habits you have turn out not to be as "irrational" as you thought -- they may thwart your consciously held goals, but they also serve your secret, shameful, or hard-to-articulate desires, which, despite not being part of your ideal self-image, still get plenty of votes on what kind of attitude you adopt and how you spend your time. There are ways to craft and mold yourself into a better person, but just writing down a list of self-improvement projects, even if you persist at it for five whole minutes, isn't likely to result in much (or any) lasting change.