You're moving pretty quickly, though, and I have trouble following you at some areas. Maybe in the future break large essays like this into a few blog posts, one for each sub-point.

Heh. This is a way scaled-back version of my original planned first post, which was to jump straight from motivated reasoning into either the Speculator/Savant divide, or the Towards/Away distinctions. I went, "crap, this is getting too long" and pulled the plug before I got to anything really "interesting", figuring that this one at least laid a little bit of groundwork and some references to build a foundation for the rest.

I'm accustomed to being able to get further in one sitting, but that's because my usual writing isn't peppered with references to experimental results and tediously building my case point by point; usually I just rely on metaphor and people's personal experiences as evidence. Here, though, I've noticed that people prefer authorities in the form of citations, to looking at their own personal experiences... so it seems to take a hell of a lot longer to build up statements of any substance.

Which is not to say it's not worth it... discussions on LW, and the preparation for this post, have helped me immensely clarify and simplify certain aspects of my knowledge and work, in ways that will help me teach my self-improvement audience better, not just communicate better on LW.