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Yvain comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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Extreme rationality is for important decisions, not for choosing your breakfast cereal. Really important decisions - by which I mean those that you'd sleep on, and allocate more than ten minutes of thought - typically coincide with changes in habits and routine, which don't happen more often than once in several months. For more common decisions, we only have time and energy for ordinary rationality.
I agree with this, but I also think that our big important decisions probably determine a lot less of our success than we like to think. A very large part of success probably comes from either the sum of our smaller decisions, or from decisions that didn't seem too important at the time but ended up making a very large difference in retrospect. The experiment I mentioned has raised my awareness of this.
I also think the big decisions are the ones it's hardest to apply extreme rationality to, both because the emotional stakes are so high and because by the time we make them we've already made a pile of smaller decisions that have tipped us in one or the other direction. See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/10/we-change-our-m.html . I predict not-significantly-different statistics for people who have trained in extreme rationality, though without a very high degree of confidence.
I spend a fair amount of time taking aim at directly this phenomenon, y'know. Summarized in Crisis of Faith.
Because the technique as described is too hard for mortals to use, or because the technique as described is inadequate?