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Elo comments on Education as Entertainment and the Downfall of LessWrong - Less Wrong Discussion
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not a terrible way to offer solutions.
I wrote a very long list of sleep maintenance suggestions to help. Not so
I really like lists as a way to gather the possible good and possible bad solutions to the problem. So long as people recognise it's a list of ideas; not an instruction manual or the answers. I would like to get around to writing about <making advice applicable>. Understanding that if this advice worked for someone there was a way that it worked. And considering if there is a way to make it work for you can maybe help you find a way to make it work for you too.
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.
As I said; <making advice applicable> 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 organising myself. By understanding the reason why; (as you said), "a method that worked for someone... to reach a local optimum." you can better plan and try to apply solutions to your own situation. (I appear to be strongly agreeing with you)