I think that if you're not a straight male you might not get the same benefits. You might get something, but it wouldn't be worth watching a twenty hour video series unless you have time to spare. It's sort of hard to explain why I feel this way. The best I can say is that the discussion and atmosphere is very man-centric, and even if some of the advice applies to women as well, it would be hard to have it hit on an emotional level, hard to differentiate between things that would and wouldn't apply to women, and hard to sit through all the discussion of nightclubs and getting laid to the relevant stuff.
Or, here's another angle. The program goes something like "women are primarily attracted to men who are assertive, independent, confident, and leaderlike - the 'alpha male'. Now I will spend hours upon hours talking about what this type of attractive man would do in a club. Okay, have you internalized this attitude yet? Surprise, you are now a little closer to becoming this independent, confident, leaderlike man, and this will help you in areas outside of women, as a nice bonus!" Can you see why this approach might not work for women?
If you still want to watch it, by all means download it and check out the first few hours for yourself, I might be wrong. But don't blame me if you don't find it useful. d:
EDIT: Apparently everyone disagrees with me, so maybe you should in fact go ahead and check it out. This is just my intuition, I guess.
Can you see why this approach might not work for women?
It depends on whom they are trying to attract. (I do like independent, confident, leaderlike women, but I guess the majority of men don't.)
I took part in a recent discussion in the current Open Thread about how instrumental rationality is under-emphasized on this website. I've heard other people say similar things, and I am inclined to agree. Someone suggested that there should be a "Instrumental Rationality Books" thread, similar to the "best textbooks on every subject" thread. I thought this sounded like a good idea.
The title is "resources" because in addition to books, you can post self-help websites, online videos, whatever.
The decorum for this thread will be as follows:
I think depending on how this thread goes, in a few days I might make a meta post on this subject in an attempt to inspire discussion on how the LessWrong community can work together to attempt to reach some sort of a consensus on what the best instrumental rationality methods and resources might be. lukeprog has already done great work in his The Science of Winning at Life sequence, but his reviews are uber-conservative and only mention resources with lots of scientific and academic backing. I think this leaves out a lot of really good stuff, and I think that we should be able to draw distinctions between stuff that isn't necessarily drawing on science but is reasonable, rational, and helps a lot of people, and The Secret.
But I thought we should get the ball rolling a little before we have that conversation. In the meantime, if you have a meta comment, you can just go ahead and post it as a reply to the top-level post.