"The most instructive experiences are those of everyday life." - Friedrich Nietzsche
What is it that the readers of lesswrong are looking for? One claim that's been repeated frequently is that we're looking for rationality tricks, shortcuts and clever methods for being rational. Problem is: there aren't any.
People generally want novelty and gimmicks. They're exciting and interesting! Useful advice tends to be dull, tedious, and familiar. We've heard it all before, and it sounded like a lot of hard work and self-discipline. If we want to lose weight, we don't do the sensible and quite difficult thing and eat a balanced diet while increasing our levels of exercise. We try fad diets and eat nothing but grapefruits for a week, or we gorge ourselves on meats and abhor carbohydrates so that our metabolisms malfunction. We lose weight that way, so clearly it's just as good as exercising and eating properly, right?
We cite Zen stories but don't take the time and effort to research their contexts, while at the same time sniggering a the actual beliefs inherent in that system. We wax rhapsodic about psychedelics and dismiss the value of everyday experiences as trivial - and handwave away praise of the mundane as utilization of "applause lights".
We talk about the importance of being rational, but don't determine what's necessary to do to become so.
Some of the greatest thinkers of the past had profound insights after paying attention to parts of everyday life that most people don't give a second thought. Archimedes realized how to determine the volume of a complex solid while lounging in a bath. Galileo recognized that pendulums could be used to reliably measure time while letting his mind drift in a cathedral.
Sure, we're not geniuses, so why try to pay attention to ordinary things? Shouldn't we concern ourselves with the novel and extraordinary instead?
Maybe we're not geniuses because we don't bother paying attention to ordinary things.
I called it an applause light last time because it makes you sound responsible, mature, and Deeply Wise without containing usable advice. I'd retract this if you could give examples of what in particular we should be doing.
If you consider mystical methods unlikely to bear fruit, and worse than a maximum ignorance prior, say it outright and justify it. But I can't tell if you're talking only about mystical "techniques" or also about psychological and Bayesian "techniques", and you think you're making a positive point instead of a negative one. I just can't figure out what that positive point is.
Yes, if there's something we know for sure increases rationality, we should be spending more time doing it instead of brainstorming new techniques. But first, there aren't many such things, and second, our inability to do them as much as we'd like is the akrasia complaint, which we've already flagged as something we need to work on.
Compare alcoholism. The mundane solution to alcoholism is to say "Just stop drinking so much" - this seems in keeping with your diet metaphor. This mundane solution very rarely works, thanks to a particularly nasty form of akrasia. The Alcoholics Anonymous program, various anti-alcoholism drugs, and other "gimmicks" are much more effective. We need techniques for an Irrationalists Anonymous program.
Everyone in the world is already having a lot of mundane experience, and it doesn't seem to have helped them much. We better do something different...and not just take more baths. Not necessarily some mystical ritual. It could just be learning a little more Bayesian math, studying lists of fallacies, or going to a philosophy class.
If your candidate for "do something different" is "pay more attention to mundane experience", then you need to define specific ways we can do that. If you literally just mean we should consciously try to elevate the level of mental attention with which we attend to daily tasks, then that's Zen. Hard Zen. Back during my Zen phase, I used to try this. Even a few minutes were unbearably difficult. It may be a valuable technique, but if it's really what you mean it needs more respect and rigor than you give it here.
If you want to continue this post as a series, please post some concrete examples of what we should be doing differently.
It must say something about the Karma system that the most frequently and most significantly downvoted poster is at No. 3 on the top posters list.