It IS important to note individual variation. If someone has a fever that's easily cured by a specific drug, but they tell you that they have a rare, fatal allergy to that medication, you don't give the drug to them anyway on the grounds that it's "unlikely" it'll kill them.
Similarly, if a particular drug is known not to have the 'normal' effect in a patient, you don't keep giving it to them in hopes that their bodies will suddenly begin acting differently.
The key is to distinguish between genuine feedback of failure, and rationalization. THIS POINT IS NOT ADDRESSED ENOUGH HERE. There are simple and effective means of identifying the difference between rationality and rationalization, but they are not discussed, they are not applied, and frankly they don't even seem to be known here at LW.
Perhaps you could write an article discussing the ways the differences between rationality and rationalization can be identified? I for one would find it useful. I find myself using rationalizations that mask themselves as rationality (often too late), and it would help me to do that less.
Reply to: Practical Advice Backed By Deep Theories
Inspired by what looks like a very damaging reticence to embrace and share brain hacks that might only work for some of us, but are not backed by Deep Theories. In support of tinkering with brain hacks and self experimentation where deep science and large trials are not available.
Eliezer has suggested that, before he will try a new anti-akraisia brain hack:
This doesn't look to me like an expected utility calculation, and I think it should. It looks like an attempt to justify why he can't be expected to win yet. It just may be deeply wrongheaded.
I submit that we don't "need" (emphasis in original) this stuff, it'd just be super cool if we could get it. We don't need to know that the next brain hack we try will work, and we don't need to know that it's general enough that it'll work for anyone who tries it; we just need the expected utility of a trial to be higher than that of the other things we could be spending that time on.
So… this isn't other-optimizing, it's a discussion of how to make decisions under uncertainty. What do all of us need to make a rational decision about which brain hacks to try?
(can these books be judged by their covers? how does this chance vary with the type of exposure? what would you need to do to understand enough about a hack that would work to increase its chance of seeming deeply compelling on first exposure?)
… and, what don't we need?
How should we decide how much time to spend gathering data and generating estimates on matters such as this? How much is Eliezer setting himself up to lose, and how much am I missing the point?