I do not believe that some of the problems Gatto wants to fix -- f.ex. the existence of television and restaurants -- are even problems at all.

The existence of television technology isn't, in my opinion, a problem. Nor is the fact that some shows are low quality. Even if all of them were low quality, I wouldn't necessarily see that as a problem - it would still be a way of relaxing. The problem I see with television is that the average person spends 4 hours a day watching it. (Can't remember where I got that study, sorry.) My problem with that is not that they aren't exercising (they'd still have an hour a day which is plenty of exercise, if they want it) or that they aren't being productive (you can only be so productive before you run out of mental stamina anyway, and the 40 hour work week was designed to use the entirety of the average person's stamina) but that they aren't living.

It could be argued that people need to spend hours every day imagining a fantasy. I was told by an elderly person once that before television, people would sit on a hill and daydream. I've also read that imagining doing a task correctly is more effective at making you better at it than practice. If that's true, daydreaming might be a necessity for maximum effectiveness and television might provide some kind of similar benefit. So it's possible that putting one's brain into fantasy mode for a few hours of day really is that beneficial.

Spending four hours a day in fantasy mode is not possible for me (I'm too motivated to DO something) and I don't seem to need anywhere near that much daydreaming. I would find it very hard to deal with if I had spent that much of my free time in fantasy. I imagine that if asked whether they would have preferred to watch x number of shows, or spent all of that free time on getting out there and living, most people would probably choose the latter - and that's sad.

he believes that if only schools could compete against each other with little to no government regulation, their quality would soar. In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly.

I think that people would also have to have read the seven lessons speech for the problems he sees to be solved. Maybe eventually things would evolve to the point where schools would not behave this way anymore without them reading it, because it's probably not the most effective way of teaching, but I don't see that change happening quickly without people pressuring schools to make those specific changes.

However, I'm surprised that you say "In practice, such scenarios tend to work out... poorly." Do you mean that the free market doesn't do much to improve quality, or do you just mean that when people want specific changes and expect the free market to implement them, the free market doesn't tend to implement those specific changes?

I'm also very interested in where you got the information to support the idea, either way.

a vehicle for transmitting their ideas

After reading Ayn Rand's the Fountainhead, my feeling was that even though much of the writing was brilliant and enjoyable, I could have gotten the key ideas much faster if she had only published a few lines from one of the last chapters. I'm having the same reaction to the sequences and HPMOR. I enjoy them and recognize the brilliance in the writing abilities, but I find myself doing things like reading lists of biases over and over in order to improve my familiarity and eventually memorize them. I still want to finish the sequences because they're so important to this culture, but what I have prioritized appears to be getting the most important information in as quickly as possible. So, although entertainment is a way of transmitting ideas, I question how efficient it is, and whether it provides enough other learning benefits to outweigh the cost of wrapping all those ideas in so much text. I could walk all the way to Florida, but flying would be faster. People realize this so if they want to take vacations, they fly. Why, then, do they use entertainment to learn instead of seeking out the most efficient method?

It makes sense from the writer's point of view. I have said before that I was very glad that Eliezer decided to popularize rationality as much as possible, as I had been thinking that somebody needed to do that for a very long time. His writing is interesting and his style is brilliant and his method has worked to attract almost twelve million hits to his site. I think that's great. But the fact that people probably would not have flocked to the site if he had posted an efficient dissemination of cognitive biases and whatnot is curious. Maybe the way I learn is different.

I am fairly convinced that any person who says "entertainment is a waste of time" is committing a fallacy of false generalization.

I think it depends on whether you use "waste of time" to mean "absolutely no benefit whatsoever" or "nowhere near the most efficient way of getting the benefit".

The statement "entertainment is an inefficient way to get ideas compared with other methods" seems true to me.