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RichardKennaway comments on Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why - Less Wrong
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But why do they not apply it? Either way, the self-help material doesn't wind up helping or harming.
Perhaps it is because most people are not nearly as free as they experience themselves to be. They think that they can learn, that they can know, that they can act, but in reality they mostly struggle with anything larger than choosing from a restaurant menu. They struggle even with no-brainers like not living as a couch potato. Why do we even have a short code for "couch potato"?
To elaborate on MattG's "doing shit differently is hard" hypothesis: implementing most kinds of self-help advice requires permanently adopting new habits, and implementing habit change is hard. We know from habit formation studies that in order to establish a new habit, you need to associate the habit with consistent rewards and triggers, so that each time that you encounter the trigger you carry out the habit, and you should also receive a reward on a fair number of the occasions that you carry out the habit. Furthermore habits can easily fall apart if the triggers aren't robust and flexible enough.
On top of this you have Scott Alexander's "Life Hack Paradox", where those self-help habits that aren't hard become saturated, and simply become the cost of doing business (E.G Goal setting, Caffeine)
Preliminary hypothesis: Doing shit differently is hard.
"Hard" is just a dormitive principle here. If we observe many people attempting a thing and few succeeding, we call it hard because that is what the word means. It is not an explanation of why most fail, only an observation that they do.
Sort of - the other reasons beside it being hard would be that it's ineffective as Gwern supposed, or that it's unpleasant, or that it's low payoff, or that the current behavior is very pleasant or very high payoff.
All these could effect how hard the effort is, but they could also effect the decision without changing how hard it is to change.
More generally, I assume that LWers are already familiar with things like, willpower depletion, status quo bias, and habit formation that make staying the same easier than changing