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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Bad reasons for a rationalist to lose - Less Wrong
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When you spend time trying out the 1000 popular hacks doing you no good, then you lose. You lose all the time and energy invested in the enterprise, for which you could find a better use.
How do you know anything works, before even thinking about what in particular to try out? How much thought, and how much work is it reasonable to use for investigating a possibility? Intuition, and evidence. Self-help folk notoriously don't give evidence for efficacy of their procedures, which in itself looks like evidence of absence of this efficacy, a reason to believe that you'll only waste time going through the motions. My intuition agrees.
A deep theory is both a tool for constructing unusually powerful techniques, and a way to signal a nontrivial probability of viability of the techniques even prior to experimental testing.
Anecdotal evidence is still evidence.
Note that one of EY's rationality principles is that if you apply arguments selectively, then the smarter you get, the stupider you become.
So, the reason I am referring to this cross-pollination of epistemic standards to an instrumental field as being "dumbass loser" thinking, is because as Richard Bach once put it, "if you argue for your limitations, then sure enough, you get to keep them."
If you require that the "useful" first be "true", then you will never be the one who actually changes anything. At best, you can only be the person who does an experiment to find the "true" in the already-useful... which will already have been adopted by those who were looking for "useful" first.