I tried it on the same example you proposed: desk-clearing. My desk is a mess; I would quite like it to be less of a mess; clearing it is never a high enough priority to make it happen. But I don't react to the thought of a clear desk with the "Mmmmmm..." response that you say is necessary for the technique to work.
As for your discussion with Jim: you did not at any point tell him that he didn't do what you'd told him to, or say anything that implied that; you did say that you think his statements contradict one another (implication: at least one of them is false; implication: you do not believe him). And then when he claimed that what stopped him was apathy and down-prioritizing by "the attention-allocating part of my brain" you told him that that wasn't really an answer, and your justification for that was that his brain doesn't really work in the way he said (implication: what he said was false; aliter, you didn't believe him).
So although you didn't use the words "I don't believe him", you did tell him that what he said couldn't be correct.
Incidentally, I find your usage of the word "incompatible" as described here so bizarre that it's hard not to see it as a rationalization aimed at avoiding admitting that you told jimrandomh he'd contradicted himself when in fact all he'd done was to say two things that couldn't both be true if your model of his mind is correct. However, I'll take your word for it that you really meant what you say you meant, and suggest that when you're using a word in so nonstandard a way you might do well to say so at the time.
But I don't react to the thought of a clear desk with the "Mmmmmm..." response that you say is necessary for the technique to work.
Did you ask yourself what it is that you would enjoy about it if it were already clean? (Again, this is strictly for my information.) Note that the procedure described in the video asks for you to wonder about what sorts of qualities would be good if you already had a clean desk, in order to find something that you like about the idea enough to generate the feeling of pleasure or relief.
...As for your discussion
Once upon a time, Seth Roberts took a European vacation and found that he started losing weight while drinking unfamiliar-tasting caloric fruit juices.
Now suppose Roberts had not known, and never did know, anything about metabolic set points or flavor-calorie associations—all this high-falutin' scientific experimental research that had been done on rats and occasionally humans.
He would have posted to his blog, "Gosh, everyone! You should try these amazing fruit juices that are making me lose weight!" And that would have been the end of it. Some people would have tried it, it would have worked temporarily for some of them (until the flavor-calorie association kicked in) and there never would have been a Shangri-La Diet per se.
The existing Shangri-La Diet is visibly incomplete—for some people, like me, it doesn't seem to work, and there is no apparent reason for this or any logic permitting it. But the reason why as many people have benefited as they have—the reason why there was more than just one more blog post describing a trick that seemed to work for one person and didn't work for anyone else—is that Roberts knew the experimental science that let him interpret what he was seeing, in terms of deep factors that actually did exist.
One of the pieces of advice on OB/LW that was frequently cited as the most important thing learned, was the idea of "the bottom line"—that once a conclusion is written in your mind, it is already true or already false, already wise or already stupid, and no amount of later argument can change that except by changing the conclusion. And this ties directly into another oft-cited most important thing, which is the idea of "engines of cognition", minds as mapping engines that require evidence as fuel.
If I had merely written one more blog post that said, "You know, you really should be more open to changing your mind—it's pretty important—and oh yes, you should pay attention to the evidence too." And this would not have been as useful. Not just because it was less persuasive, but because the actual operations would have been much less clear without the explicit theory backing it up. What constitutes evidence, for example? Is it anything that seems like a forceful argument? Having an explicit probability theory and an explicit causal account of what makes reasoning effective, makes a large difference in the forcefulness and implementational details of the old advice to "Keep an open mind and pay attention to the evidence."
It is also important to realize that causal theories are much more likely to be true when they are picked up from a science textbook than when invented on the fly—it is very easy to invent cognitive structures that look like causal theories but are not even anticipation-controlling, let alone true.
This is the signature style I want to convey from all those posts that entangled cognitive science experiments and probability theory and epistemology with the practical advice—that practical advice actually becomes practically more powerful if you go out and read up on cognitive science experiments, or probability theory, or even materialist epistemology, and realize what you're seeing. This is the brand that can distinguish LW from ten thousand other blogs purporting to offer advice.
I could tell you, "You know, how much you're satisfied with your food probably depends more on the quality of the food than on how much of it you eat." And you would read it and forget about it, and the impulse to finish off a whole plate would still feel just as strong. But if I tell you about scope insensitivity, and duration neglect and the Peak/End rule, you are suddenly aware in a very concrete way, looking at your plate, that you will form almost exactly the same retrospective memory whether your portion size is large or small; you now possess a deep theory about the rules governing your memory, and you know that this is what the rules say. (You also know to save the dessert for last.)
I want to hear how I can overcome akrasia—how I can have more willpower, or get more done with less mental pain. But there are ten thousand people purporting to give advice on this, and for the most part, it is on the level of that alternate Seth Roberts who just tells people about the amazing effects of drinking fruit juice. Or actually, somewhat worse than that—it's people trying to describe internal mental levers that they pulled, for which there are no standard words, and which they do not actually know how to point to. See also the illusion of transparency, inferential distance, and double illusion of transparency. (Notice how "You overestimate how much you're explaining and your listeners overestimate how much they're hearing" becomes much more forceful as advice, after I back it up with a cognitive science experiment and some evolutionary psychology?)
I think that the advice I need is from someone who reads up on a whole lot of experimental psychology dealing with willpower, mental conflicts, ego depletion, preference reversals, hyperbolic discounting, the breakdown of the self, picoeconomics, etcetera, and who, in the process of overcoming their own akrasia, manages to understand what they did in truly general terms—thanks to experiments that give them a vocabulary of cognitive phenomena that actually exist, as opposed to phenomena they just made up. And moreover, someone who can explain what they did to someone else, thanks again to the experimental and theoretical vocabulary that lets them point to replicable experiments that ground the ideas in very concrete results, or mathematically clear ideas.
Note the grade of increasing difficulty in citing:
If you don't know who to trust, or you don't trust yourself, you should concentrate on experimental results to start with, move on to thinking in terms of causal theories that are widely used within a science, and dip your toes into math and epistemology with extreme caution.
But practical advice really, really does become a lot more powerful when it's backed up by concrete experimental results, causal accounts that are actually true, and math validly interpreted.