I admit I may not have phrased that the best way, I was going out of my way to make the initial description of the nerd failure mode sound superficially reasonable. While doing so, I tried to hint at a cluster of subtle mistakes without spelling them out. You write:

If I'm addressing you, it makes sense to simply suggest that you behavior more optimally.

That might be true if you're addressing me, but not true if you're addressing someone else. One issue is that what makes sense for talking to rationalists who know how to take the kind of advice you're giving, or are merely a short inferential distance from you, may not make sense for talking to the general public.

What I was really getting at, though, was the mistake of not not realizing what the hard part of the problem is, not even asking yourself that question, and acting as if noticing sub-optimal behavior was the hard part. But since reversed stupidity is not intelligence, realizing something is sub-optimal is often not enough to identify a better alternative. And other times, identifying the better alternative is easy--so easy, in fact, that the only reason there is a problem at all is because of the difficulty of getting people to follow it.