First off, take a look here and here.

There's tons of things to consider, even assuming I have a tireless work ethic and can implement this immediately.

This is the first thing that jumped out at me. I would recommend the Confidence Spiral approach, where you set small goals you can reach and use that to gradually ramp up your projects. Measure what you do in terms of improvements over default, rather than subtractions from perfect. For example, I'm going to recommend a bunch of books and blog posts in the remainder of this comment. You could read them all at once and try to apply them all at once- but it's better to read a book, attempt to apply it, then read it again in a month or year later with your new knowledge of having tried to apply it. Once your attempts to apply the first book are in place (but before you do the review), then start the second book.

what would you recommend that I do over the next year, to give me the biggest utility bonus the fastest, both in intelligence and wealth?

There are three parts here.

Utility bonus: Being happy is a skill. Read How to be Happy, Scott Adam's Happiness Engineering, and a book on cognitive behavior therapy, either feeling good or a workbook targeted at anything you want to be better at. (Effective therapy teaches people interpersonal and intrapersonal skills whose lack are generally at the root of their problems. Even if you don't have any problems at the clinical level it's useful to use the skills to make yourself better than default, to make developing those problems less likely, and to be able to give solid advice to other people who do have problems at the clinical level.)

Intelligence: Your maximum intelligence is pretty much fixed at this point. You have two options open: be at a higher fraction of your maximum intelligence more often, and skill growth. You're already here, so I won't mention rationality besides to mention that my current favorite book on decision science is Decisive.

The first is done mostly by clean living- eat well, get plenty of sleep, and minimize cognitive load by moving obligations out of your memory into external storage. If you want to do this rigorously, use Quantified Mind to track the effects of interventions, but for most interventions the problem is not knowing whether or not they're working, but putting in the effort to sustain the intervention. Your high school that starts at a terrible time- actively develop the skill of going to sleep early to get a full 9 hours of rest. Melatonin might help. Getting Things Done is the book that details how to use todo lists and external memory to reduce cognitive load, but it won't be that important for you. Use Anki to memorize things you need to know for school, as well as things that you come across that you want your system 2 to have available.

Skill growth comes not from demonstrating what you can do but learning what you can't yet do well. This means that practice needs to be deliberate to be effective, and will often be effortful. (That doesn't mean it won't be fun- but make sure you're consistently challenged, and not avoiding areas where your skills are lacking.) Here, read So Good They Can't Ignore You,

Wealth: The standard way these days for clever young people to earn extra cash is by providing basic technical services to people in their social circle or their parent's social circle that don't know where to look for professional technical services. This will be stuff like website design, computer repair, putting things on eBay, and so on. I haven't seriously investigated this in a long time, and so this could be out of date.

Long term, your wealth will in large part depend on your social skills. Read How To Win Friends and Influence People, Getting to Yes and possibly Never Eat Alone (the name is a good tip, but the book contains much more). Get to know people in positions of influence, and try to make it as pleasant for them to be around you.

You should put this in the open thread. I didn't downvote this, but don't want Discussion be cluttered with "here are some superficial facts about me, now please optimize my life"-type posts.

Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don't think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.

It makes complete sense within the story for all the female characters to do what they do, given what they've defined to be and what circumstances have arisen. The death of hermione makes complete sense. But its a fridging, of course its a fridging, because you are the author. You created these characters, and put them into the situation. If you tell a Superman story where he kills, and you set up circumstances where the only thing he can do is kill, then, sure, within the story, we buy that Superman needed to kill in that circumstance. But you, the author, put him in that circumstance, made him and his opponents make choices which led to that death, because you wanted him to kill.

I don't think Eliezer necessarily intended to make the female characters in this fic weaker than the male ones, more passive, more timid, more prone to mistakes, but thats how it has turned out. And for the defence that this is what he got from canon? Well to be honest its quite clear that many of these characters aren't the characters from canon. Moody is far more competent, Dumbledore very different, and Quirrel... Yet Hermione and McGonnogal are essentially as flawed as they were in the original text.

A feminist reading does not negate the quality of something, and I wouldn't necessarily say the story should be modified at this point at all, but its something to be aware of. We can enjoy problematic things even while acknowledging they're problematic. HPMOR isn't the first and won't be the last piece of fiction to fail at a feminist reading.

Seeing a glowing super bright human patronus for the first time might be enough to get an ' "AHHHHHHHHHH"'

I think Harry spent the time sitting in front of the room planning what he was going to do to revive Hermione, because what went wrong when he got her killed was largely due to time constraints. It is explicitly stated that he was there for hours, and Minerva says it looks like years have passed when he comes out. So, I also think that whatever Harry planned, and then tried for several hours, did not work, and he came out with Hermione still dead. He is saying that there is nothing left to plan at the beginning of 92, whereas after he cools Hermione he thinks that he now has time to think. That strongly suggests he thought, tried the plan, and it failed.

On the other hand, Minerva has been told explicitly that people have generally not done everything they can, teaches Transfiguration, and quite definitely feels terrible over Hermione's death. She is also free to use the Time-Turner. So, yes, I also think she went back, Transfigured herself into Hermione, and let herself be killed, as that was, by that point, the only way to save Hermione's life. She probably borrowed Harry's invisibility cloak to hide Hermione from all the people who mustn't know that she is still alive if she is to survive. That hasn't happened yet, but there is still time. (Note that she also identifies with the other specified victim of the troll, Mrs Norris.)

This is well within Minerva's capabilities as stated, explains who was asking for the troll to be led away (Hermione under a cloak), and fits with Dumbledore's comment about losing another friend instead. It also has the potential to appease the feminists, because Hermione is saved by a woman acting heroically after Harry has failed.

I also find it a lot easier to live with. My reaction to death has got stronger as I've got older, and I cope a lot more easily with someone sacrificing themselves to save someone else than with someone just being killed. Agency matters. I still feel a bit sorry for the troll, though.

Hiya! Welcome to Less Wrong.

That sounds like a good experience to have as young as possible, finding out that your world view is susceptible to being wrong and needing to be changed. The longer you wait for the first one of those, the harder it is to avoid just closing your eyes to it. Now, though, you're more mentally prepared if it ever happens again.

Hi! I want to use the Rationality Methods to improve my understanding of myself and how to improve. I guess you could say I had a strange way of "waking up" to Rationality. Many say they looked to rationality after realizing their religion was .... yeah. Well... That was a bit strange for me. when my parents married, "I was born about a year later", they were both from christian families and just went with it. When they realized that Christianity didn't match with the way things actually worked, the explained it all out to me. I was 5. Naturally that got my 5 year old mind thinking, "Wait.... Daddy was WRONG???". It took him about 2 hours to explain this strange new concept to me. That was step 1, on my path to rationality. I... am a 13 year old, confident, curious young male who decided that he wanted to skip the 30 years of bad habits and jump to the rational part. For my security, call me "Ambition".