I remember reading through that list sometime in the past, and I wanted to point something out to you.
[Disclaimer: all of the below is per my current understanding. It is a strong opinion moderately held.]
Sleep regulation is an example of optimizing a highly non-linear and volatile system with a multi-dimensional parameter space.
And in this class of problems, listing various parameters is good only as a way to know what is the space we are trying to optimize over. But if you try to gather information about how useful is each of those, you are shooting yourself in the foot before you even started.
If you hear a report of a method that worked for someone, it merely means it was the last missing piece to reach a local optimum.
In other words, this class of problems inherently do not have stable object level solutions.
Edit: please tell me if what I'm saying sounds wrong to your ears, I'm afraid I've forgotten myself a little and ignored the possible inferential distances I might have here and there. So from my perspective this simply points to the idea to apply and test some of the meta-level strategies that work in other contexts, like timeboxing imitations of various people, or upsetting the system on purpose to find a new local optimum, both of which may work better than random walk on the parameter space.
do not have stable object level solutions.
As I said; is a viable strategy, and as a step in the process; understanding why advice is applicable; can help you in applying it.
Example: advice - spend less time organising and just get down to it, (was offered to me by a student who was borderline OCD, enjoyed the scheduling side of things).
I looked at this advice and realised it is really great advice (for herself, or others in her position,) for people who spend too much time organising, but entirely not helpful for myself who spends zero (+/-) time org...
Note 1: I'm not very serious about the second part of the title, I just thought it sounds more catchy. I'm a long time lurker writing here for the first time, and it's not my intention to alienate anyone. Also, hi, nice to meet you. Please leave a comment to achieve a result of making me happy about you having left a comment. But let's get to the point.
I think you might be familiar with TED Talks. Recall the last time you watched one, and how you felt while doing it.
[BZRT BZRT sound of imagination working]
In my case, I often got the feeling like if I was learning something valuable while watching most TED Talks. The speakers are (mostly) obviously passionate and intelligent people, speaking about important matters they care about a lot. (Granted, I probably haven't watched more than a dozen TED Talks in all my life, so my sample is quite small, but I think it isn't very unrepresentative.)
But at some point, I started asking myself afterwards:
Which translates in my internal dialect to:
(Note 2: don't treat this "one sentence summary" thing too strictly - of course it's only a reflex/shorthand that is useful in many situations, but not all. I like it because it's simple enough that it's installable as a subconscious trigger-action.)
And I could not state afterwards anything actually useful that I have learned from those "fascinating" videos (with at most one or two small exceptions).
This is exactly what I mean by "Education as Entertainment".
It's getting the enjoyable *feeling* of learning without any real progress.
[DUM DUM DUM sound of increasing dramatism]
And now, what if you use this concept to look at rationality materials?
For me, reading the core Eliezer's braindump (basically the content of "From AI to Zombies"), as well as braindumps (in the form of blogs) of several other people from the LW community, had definite learning value.
I take notes when I read those, and I have an accountability system in place that enables me to make sure I follow up on all the advice I give to myself, test the new ideas, and improve/drop/replace/implement as needed.
However, when I read (a significant part of) the content produced by the "modern" community-powered-LessWrong, I classify its actual learning value at around the same level as TED Talks.
Or YouTube videos with cats, only those don't give me the *impression* that I'm learning something.
THE END
Please let me know what you think.
Final Note: Please take my remarks with a grain of salt. What I write is meant to inspire thoughts in you, not to represent my best factual knowledge about the LW community.