Thanks! It might also be nice if your article called itself a summary of some of my freely available writings on the topic of pain/gain motivation.

I wouldn't want to hurt my Status by appearing to only have this tiny handful of things to say. ;-)

If Eliezer Yudowsky came to your house and handed you a gun and said that he would need your help with killing some people, that there was a very good reason for doing so and he would explain on the way there, would you get in the van?

Bearing in mind, of course, that he's convinced people to let an unFriendly AI out of the box, so once he gets you alone he'll probably be able to convince you of just about anything.

The predictions you should make from personality assessments and the like about yourself should be fairly isomorphic to those you'd make about other people upon learning the same data. For instance, if I know someone with a particular Myers-Briggs result, and then I learn that another person has the same one, I will expect a certain level of similarity between the two people on that basis; I should make the same guess if I discover that I have the same Myers-Briggs score as someone I know. Tests themselves often supply predictions, although they're very vague and may require some precisification.

I'll use the love language idea because that's so easy to implement. There's five of them, and while I think there's a test available, it probably doesn't improve much on self-diagnosis. So, I look at the descriptions of the languages, conclude that I'm a "quality time" person because that fits best, and read what it says to expect from myself: Hmm, are distractions, postponed dates, or the failure to listen especially hurtful to me? And then I take off from there. (If I can't easily answer the question or refine my self-model relative to the provided suggestion, I assume that the description is accurate.)

Tips on getting friends/family to provide feedback: I find musing aloud about myself in an obviously tentative manner to be fairly useful at eliciting some domain-specific input. Some of my friends I can ask point-blank, although it helps to ask about specific situations ("Do you think I'm just tired?" "Was I over the line back there?") rather than general traits that feel more judgmental to discuss ("Am I a jerk?" "Do I use people?"). When you communicate in text and keep logs, you can send people pastes of entire conversations (when this is permissible to your original interlocutor) and ask what your consultant thinks of that. If you do not remember some event, or are willing to pretend not to remember the event, then you can get whoever was with you at the time to recount it from their perspective - this process will automatically paint what you did during the event in the light of outside scrutiny.

From the introductory post:

I have some reason to believe that I am substantially more luminous than average, because I can ask people what seem to me to be perfectly easy questions about what they're thinking and find them unable to answer.

Based on this idea, could you write some kind of luminosity diagnostic? It seems like people would be more likely to want to change if they knew what they're missing (I know I would).

Adding the "akrasia" tag would be helpful here.

You can just answer it for each case. Would you take either pill if they were irreversible? If they were reversible?

I'm somewhat sympathetic to that idea (I haven't felt guilty about being straightish, but I've wished I were more bisexual once in a while, and succeeded in pushing myself in that direction in some cases), but I'm curious now: is gender the only dimension you'd apply that to? Would you also take a pill (again assuming it's really really safe) that would make all outward physical attributes irrelevant to how attractive you find someone? Would you take a pill that would make you enjoy every non-harmful sexual practice/fetish (not necessarily seeking them out, but able to enjoy it if a partner initiated it)?

(I originally started writing this comment thinking something like "hmm, I'd take the bi-pill, but let's take that reasoning to its vaguely-logical conclusion and see if it's still palatable", but now I'm actually thinking I'd probably take both of those pills too.)

"Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is your victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men."

--Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

"One thousand five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat... and fifteen minutes ago, you knew people were alone on this planet. Think about what you'll know tomorrow." -- Agent K, "Men in Black"

Maybe, but I certainly assumed she was female the first time I heard the name, and I had never heard it before... maybe associations with Alice or Allison or whatever. Anyway it sure seems determinately female to me.