I have a problem: I'm not sure what this community is about.

To illustrate, recently I've been experimenting with a number of tricks to overcome my akrasia. This morning, a succession of thoughts struck me:

1. The readers of Less Wrong have been interested in the subject of akrasia, maybe I should make a top-level post of my experiences once I see what works and what doesn't.
2. But wait, that would be straying into the territory of traditional self-help, and I'm sure there are already plenty of blogs and communities for that. It isn't about rationality anymore.
3. But then, we have already discussed akrasia several times, isn't this then also on-topical?
4. (Even if this was topical, wouldn't a simple recount of "what worked for me" be too Kaj-optimized to work for very many others?)

Part of the problem seems to stem from the fact that we have a two-fold definition of rationality:

1. Epistemic rationality: believing, and updating on evidence, so as to systematically improve the correspondence between your map and the territory. The art of obtaining beliefs that correspond to reality as closely as possible. This correspondence is commonly termed "truth" or "accuracy", and we're happy to call it that.
2. Instrumental rationality: achieving your values. Not necessarily "your values" in the sense of being selfish values or unshared values: "your values" means anything you care about. The art of choosing actions that steer the future toward outcomes ranked higher in your preferences. On LW we sometimes refer to this as "winning".

If this community was only about epistemic rationality, there would be no problem. Akrasia isn't related to epistemic rationality, and neither are most self-help tricks. Case closed.

However, by including instrumental rationality, we have expanded the sphere of potential topics to cover practically anything. Productivity tips, seduction techniques, the best ways for grooming your physical appearance, the most effective ways to relax (and by extension, listing the best movies / books / video games of all time), how you can most effectively combine different rebate coupons and where you can get them from... all of those can be useful in achieving your values.