Thank you, calcasm, for this sequence, and apologies in advance to everyone for this being a bit of a rant and likely having been said before. I fear that the very practical suggestions are going to be lost because people's brains are being overridden by a combination of:

• He's using examples and techniques from LDS, who are evil cultish religious people using these techniques for evil cultish reasons!
• These techniques are designed to get someone to be inclined to change, or even worse to identify as members of a community and perhaps even adopt beliefs more often or more effectively than they would have by pure logic and reading blog posts. Dark Arts!

This big danger that Less Wrong is going to turn into a cult is a phantom. It has always been a phantom. Starting a cult whose core teaching is essentially "Think for yourself, schmuck!" together with techniques for doing so effectively may be the worst idea for a cult in world history.

If there is a cult here, not that I think there is, it is the cult of pure reason that thinks it is a sin to use any technique that could possibly reinforce a false belief or a behavior we might dislike, the cult of people crying out "Cult!" I'm sick of it because I want there to be more of us, I want us to better embody the ideals of rationality, and to use them to accomplish more and to be effective.

This is exactly the form that this information needs be in, and it's information that is available because of what this man does for a living. Rather than complain that all references to religion be redacted and replaced, we should thank him for turning his insight over to the side of truth, justice and other neat stuff like that.