I've found that "just the facts" doesn't really work for self-help, because you need to a) be able to remember the advice b) believe on an emotional, not just rational level that it works and c) be actually motivated to implement the advice. This usually necessitates having the giver of advice drum it into you a whole bunch of different ways over the course of the eight hours or so spent reading the book.

Very true and a good observation. My reading of stoic practice informs this further: They had their sayings and short lists of "just the facts" but also put emphasis on their continuous practice. Indeed, my current critique of lesswrong is based on this impression. But to counter your point: I had things like Mister Money Moustache in mind where multiple screen pages are devoted to a single sentence of actual advice. I dislike that just as I don't like Eliezer's roundabout way of explaining things.

One problem with this is that "reviewing" self-help books is hard because ultimately the judge of a good self-help book is whether or not it helps you, and you can't judge that until a few months down the road. Plus there can be an infinity of confounding factors.

This can be helped by stating the criteria in advance. A few of the important criteria, at least for me, are correctness of advice, academic support, high information density and readability. So some kind of judgement can be readily made immediately after reading the book. Or a professional can review the book regarding it's correctness.

But I can see your point. Making practical instrumentality issues more of a theme of the conversation here is appealing to me. Cut down on the discussion of boring, useless things (to me, of course) like Newcomb's problem and utility functions and instead discuss how to be happy and how to make money.

However, I have seen a few people complain about how LessWrong's quality is deteriorating because the discussion is being overrun with "self-help". So not everyone feels this way, for whatever reason.

My suggestion is/was to seperate the discussion part of lesswrong in two parts: Instrumental and epistemic. That way everyone gets his part without reading too much, for them, unnecessary content. But people are opposed to something like that, too. Fact is, the community here is changing and something has to be done about that. Usually people are very intelligent and informed around here so I would love to hear their opinions on issues that matter to me.