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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Beware of Other-Optimizing - Less Wrong
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I tried reading your blog posts and couldn't (allergic to your style), but I'm sorry to inform you that you haven't reached the level of universal generalizations as yet. The stories you make up to explain why your tricks work are not the deep answers which constrain both the rule and the exception; from other sciences I have learned what true general models of the human mind look like, and your explanations, I'm afraid, are not in that class. The fully general art of combating human akrasia has not been invented by you. Your clients are only the ones for whom your techniques happen to work.
I hope that having discovered some tricks that work for some people is enough honor for you; and that you do not need to claim that your tricks work universally in order to value them. And that it does not wound you too deeply, if there are some people for whom your advice does not yet work, and who you do not yet understand. This is not the counsel of despair: study the exception and the rule, and you may find the deeper law.
Of course you could decide that I'm just being lazy. (Laughs.)
"...from other sciences I have learned what true general models of the human mind look like..."
I would love to see some examples of this.
"The lateral geniculate nucleus preprocesses visual information on the way from the retina to the visual cortex" would be a cheap example. The representativeness heuristic and conjunction fallacy would be a less cheap one.
The cheap example works, but, as you said, it's cheap. The logical fallacies tell me very little in terms of actually modeling the mind, because they generalize too far. A useful model of the human mind that actually addresses akrasia would have to fall in between those two extremes.
I've followed pjeby's work for almost 3 years now, and I've been a client of his for 2. From what I've seen, it's a collection of techniques, some new and some modified from pre-existing work, founded on a system of theories about how beliefs are stored and cached in the brain, how emotional responses are coded, and how this data can be manipulated. The use of these techniques is systematized - i.e. in situation X, do Y - but the process of determining the current situation is, as in modern medicine, a mixture of strict procedure and intuition. I mention all this because a) while specific advice does not generalize, the system and process do, and b) this systematization is not clear from his blog, which is targeted towards the self-help audience, rather than aspiring rationalists.