The gist of your top-level comment here is that your techniques work for everyone; and if they don't work for someone, it's that person's fault.
Here's the problem: when someone argues that some techniques might not work for some people, their objective is not merely to achieve epistemic accuracy.
Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping. "Bruce" is saying, "not everything works for everyone... therefore, what you have might not work for me... therefore, I don't have to risk trying and failing."
In other words, the point of saying that not every technique works for everyone is to apply the Fallacy of Grey: not everything works for everybody, therefore all techniques are alike, therefore you cannot compare my performance to anyone else, because maybe your technique just won't work for me. Therefore, I am safe from your judgment.
This is a fully general argument against trying ANY technique, for ANY purpose. It has ZERO to do with who came up with the technique or who's suggesting it; it's just a Litany Against Fear... of failure.
As a rationalist and empiricist, I want to admit the possibility that I could be wrong. However, as an instrumentalist, instructor, and helper-of-people, I'm going to say that, if you allow your logic to excuse your losing, you fail logic, you fail rationality, and you fail life.
So no, I won't be "reasonable", because that would be a failure of rationality. I do not claim that any technique X will always work for all persons; I merely claim that, given a person Y, there is always some technique X that will produce a behavior change.
The point is not to argue that a particular value of X may not work with a particular value of Y, the point is to find X.
(And the search space for X, seen from the "inside view", is about two orders of magnitude smaller than it appears to be from the "outside view".)
Instead, the real point of arguing such a thing is a form of self-handicapping. "Bruce" is saying, "not everything works for everyone... therefore, what you have might not work for me... therefore, I don't have to risk trying and failing."
I'm pretty surprised to see you make this type of argument. Are you really so sure that you have that precise of an understanding of the motives behind everyone who has brought this up? You seem oblivious to the predictable consequences of acting so unreasonably confident in your own theories. Your ...
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?