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RomeoStevens comments on Thoughts on designing policies for oneself - Less Wrong
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It has helped me to realize that the policies I implement to govern my behavior are implicit hypotheses about my behavior. The general form is "I predict that installing policy X will produce behavior Y." In the past when my imposed self-regulatory policies have failed I have viewed it as a personal failure, a failure of the will, my failure to adhere to the policy. It helped a lot to realize that my hypothesis was merely wrong. I became free to update. I started learning from my failures.
So much this. It's a common lesswrong mantra but it's hard to really internalize the implications of you are running on hostile hardware. These sorts of experiments are akin to gathering intelligence on a clever enemy.
See also: Alien parasite technical guy.
I like to describe policy-breakage-rationalization as "Your brain will work very hard to lie to you."
Where's the original source of the hostile hardware quote, by the way? It's attributed to Justin Corwin. I wanted to look it up in context, but all the google hits lead back here.
Weird, I could have sworn I've seen it a bunch of times. I guess it just made an impression on me and I use it a lot.