(A shorter gloss of Fun Theory is "31 Laws of Fun", which summarizes the advice of Fun Theory to would-be Eutopian authors and futurists.)

Fun Theory is the field of knowledge that deals in questions such as "How much fun is there in the universe?", "Will we ever run out of fun?", "Are we having fun yet?" and "Could we be having more fun?"

Many critics (including George Orwell) have commented on the inability of authors to imagine Utopias where anyone would actually want to live.  If no one can imagine a Future where anyone would want to live, that may drain off motivation to work on the project.  The prospect of endless boredom is routinely fielded by conservatives as a knockdown argument against research on lifespan extension, against cryonics, against all transhumanism, and occasionally against the entire Enlightenment ideal of a better future.

Fun Theory is also the fully general reply to religious theodicy (attempts to justify why God permits evil).  Our present world has flaws even from the standpoint of such eudaimonic considerations as freedom, personal responsibility, and self-reliance.  Fun Theory tries to describe the dimensions along which a benevolently designed world can and should be optimized, and our present world is clearly not the result of such optimization.  Fun Theory also highlights the flaws of any particular religion's perfect afterlife - you wouldn't want to go to their Heaven.

So this is Utopia, is it?  Well
I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.
        -- Sir Max Beerholm, verse entitled
        In a Copy of More's (or Shaw's or Wells's or Plato's or Anybody's) Utopia

This is a shorter summary of the Fun Theory Sequence with all the background theory left out - just the compressed advice to the would-be author or futurist who wishes to imagine a world where people might actually want to live:

1. Think of a typical day in the life of someone who's been adapting to Utopia for a while.  Don't anchor on the first moment of "hearing the good news".  Heaven's "You'll never have to work again, and the streets are paved with gold!" sounds like good news to a tired and poverty-stricken peasant, but two months later it might not be so much fun.  (Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun.)
2. Beware of packing your Utopia with things you think people should do that aren't actually fun.  Again, consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn't sound like loads of endless fun, but you're supposed to enjoy praying, so no one can point this out.  (Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun.)
3. Making a video game easier doesn't always improve it.  The same holds true of a life.  Think in terms of clearing out low-quality drudgery to make way for high-quality challenge, rather than eliminating work.  (High Challenge.)
4. Life should contain novelty - experiences you haven't encountered before, preferably teaching you something you didn't already know.  If there isn't a sufficient supply of novelty (relative to the speed at which you generalize), you'll get bored.  (Complex Novelty.)

I recently had occasion to review some of the akrasia tricks I've found on Less Wrong, and it occurred to me that there's probably quite a lot of others who've tried them as well.  Perhaps it's a good idea to organize the experiences of a couple dozen procrastinating rationalists?

Therefore, I'll aggregate any such data you provide in the comments, according to the following scheme:

1. Note which trick you've tried.  If it's something that's not yet on the list below, please provide a link and I'll add it; if there's not a link for it anywhere, you can describe it in your comment and I'll link that.
2. Give your experience with it a score from -10 to +10 (0 if it didn't change the status quo, 10 if it ended your akrasia problems forever with no side effects, negative scores if it actually made your life worse, -10 if it nearly killed you); if you don't do so, I'll suggest a score for you based on what else you say.
3. Describe your experience with it, including any significant side effects.

Every so often, I'll combine all the data back into the main post, listing average scores, sample size and common effects for each technique.  Ready?

When you're suffering from a life-changing illness, where do you find information about its likely progression? How do you decide among treatment options?

You don't want to rely on studies in medical journals because their conclusion-drawing methodologies are haphazard. You'll be better off getting your prognosis and treatment decisions from a social networking site: PatientsLikeMe.com.

PatientsLikeMe.com lets patients with similar illnesses compare symptoms, treatments and outcomes. As Jamie Heywood at TEDMED 2009 explains, this represents an enormous leap forward in the scope and methodology of clinical trials. I highly recommend his excellent talk, and I will paraphrase part of it below.

(This was originally a link to a post on my blog, A survey of anti-cryonics writing. Eliezer asked me to include the entire text of the article here.)

For its advocates, cryonics offers almost eternal life. To its critics, cryonics is pseudoscience; the idea that we could freeze someone today in such a way that future technology might be able to re-animate them is nothing more than wishful thinking on the desire to avoid death. Many who battle nonsense dressed as science have spoken out against it: see for example Nano Nonsense and Cryonics, a 2001 article by celebrated skeptic Michael Shermer; or check the Skeptic's Dictionary or Quackwatch entries on the subject, or for more detail read the essay Cryonics–A futile desire for everlasting life by "Invisible Flan".

That it seems so makes me sad, because to my naive eyes it seems like it might work and I would quite like to live forever, but I know that I don't know enough to judge. The celebrated Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman tells a story of a US general who spoke to him at a party and explained that one big challenge in desert warfare is keeping the tanks fuelled given the huge distances the fuel has to travel. What would really help, the general said, would be if boffins like Feynman could invent a sort of engine that was powered by sand. On this issue, I'm in the same position as the general; in the same way as a tank fuelled by sand seems plausible enough to him, it makes sense to me to imagine that however your brain stores information it probably has something to do with morphology and chemistry, so there's a good chance it might not evaporate right away at the instant of legal death, and that freezing might be a way to keep the information there long enough for future societies to extract it with their future-technology scanning equipment.

And of course the pro-cryonics people have written reams and reams of material such as Ben Best's Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice on why they think this is exactly as plausible as I might think, and going into tremendous technical detail setting out arguments for its plausibility and addressing particular difficulties. It's almost enough to make you want to sign up on the spot.

Except, of course, that plenty of totally unscientific ideas are backed by reams of scientific-sounding documents good enough to fool non-experts like me. Backed by the deep pockets of the oil industry, global warming denialism has produced thousands of convincing-sounding arguments against the scientific consensus on CO2 and AGW. Thankfully in that instance we have blogs like Tim Lambert's Deltoid, RealClimate, and many others tracking the various ways that the denialists mislead, whether through cherry-picking evidence, misleading quotes from climate scientists, or outright lies. Their hard work means that denialists can barely move or speak without someone out there checking what they have to say against science's best understanding and pointing out the misrepresentations and discrepancies. So before I pony up my £25 a month to sign up to cryonics life insurance, I want to read the Deltoid of cryonics - the articles that take apart what cryonics advocates write about what they do and really go into the scientific detail on why it doesn't hang together.

Here's my report on what I've found so far.

(Response to: You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead, Welcome to Heaven)

The Omega Corporation
Internal Memorandum
To: Omega, CEO
From: Gamma, Vice President, Hedonic Maximization

Sir, this concerns the newest product of our Hedonic Maximization Department, the Much-Better-Life Simulator. This revolutionary device allows our customers to essentially plug into the Matrix, except that instead of providing robots with power in flagrant disregard for the basic laws of thermodynamics, they experience a life that has been determined by rigorously tested algorithms to be the most enjoyable life they could ever experience. The MBLS even eliminates all memories of being placed in a simulator, generating a seamless transition into a life of realistic perfection.

Our department is baffled. Orders for the MBLS are significantly lower than estimated. We cannot fathom why every customer who could afford one has not already bought it. It is simply impossible to have a better life otherwise. Literally. Our customers' best possible real life has already been modeled and improved upon many times over by our programming. Yet, many customers have failed to make the transition. Some are even expressing shock and outrage over this product, and condemning its purchasers.