the thing that bothered me most about Harry was his overuse of formal techniques instead of just trying to grok the whole situation in a more organic fashion; that just seems like a good way to miss something.

I can't speak to how well this works out for Harry (I haven't read HPMoR) but I think I can guess why this bites people in real life.

The methods that work for someone tend to be the ones they're already familiar with. Why? At least two reasons. The boring one is that people are less likely to stick with methods that obviously don't work, so obviously bad methods get forgotten about and become unfamiliar again. The more interesting reason is that using a method makes it "better": practice allows you to apply it more quickly when it's relevant, you learn to recognize more quickly the situations where the method's relevant, and you get better at integrating what you learn from that method with your other thoughts.

This is why it can be safer to organically accrete a system of thinking piece by piece than to install a fully-fledged system in one go; you only have to keep one piece in your head at a time, and you can focus on that one piece for a while until you're used to it and can apply it without much conscious effort. By contrast, trying to take on a complete system in one go means you're constantly having to think hard about which parts of it are relevant to each problem you confront. It's the difference between seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and knowing you need a screwdriver to tighten it, and seeing a loose screw sticking out of something and emptying your toolbox on the floor so you can try each tool one-by-one.

The important distinction isn't so much between formal methods and organic methods, but between methods you've fully internalized and methods you haven't. A formal method that's permanently imprinted into your mind through practice is likely to be quicker to use, easier to use, and more effective than an informal method you've only just heard about. Eventually, if you practice a technique enough, formal or not, there's a good chance your brain will automatically reach out and apply it in the normal course of grokking a whole situation organically. (For example, if I need to predict or reason about some recurrent event in my life, I often automatically apply reference class forecasting without much thought, and I readily integrate that information with any other information I can glean about the event.)

So I think it makes sense to take this stuff at whatever pace feels comfortable. Certainly, when I first landed on LW, I didn't shoot off and read all of the sequences of core posts in one go. I just clicked around, read recent discussions, and when people referred to individual posts in the sequences while discussing other things, I'd click through and read the post they linked to. (And then if I felt like reading more, I'd look at the other posts linked by that post!)

I'll definitely keep reading.

Enjoy the site!