It's not clear to me that donating to AMF is a reliable sign of their increased rationality. How do you know you're not simply guilt tripping them?

I've found that engaging people about their rationality habits is frequently something that needs to be done in a manner which is significantly more confrontational than what is considered polite conversation. Being told that how you think is flawed at a fundamental level is very difficult to deal with, and people will be inclined to not deal with it. ... So if you want to convince someone to be more rational, bug them about it.

Let me make just a small change...

I've found that engaging people about their belief in Jesus is frequently something that needs to be done in a manner which is significantly more confrontational than what is considered polite conversation. Being told that how you live is flawed at a fundamental level is very difficult to deal with, and people will be inclined to not deal with it. ... So if you want to convince someone to love Jesus, bug them about it.

Do you have any reason to believe that people will react to the first better than to the second?

How can we spread rationality and good decision making to people who aren't inclined to it?

I recently chatted up a friendly doorman who I normally exchange brief pleasantries with. He told me that he was from a particularly rough part of town and that he works three jobs to support his family. He also told me not to worry because he has a new business that makes a lot of money, although had to borrow gas money to get to work that day. He said that he was part of a "travel club". I immediately felt bad because I had a gut feeling he was talking about some multi-level marketing scheme. I asked him if it was and he confirmed it was, but disagreed that it was a "scheme". He told me that he is trying to recruit his family, and that the business model encourages recruiting among family and friends. Skip 45 minutes of him selling it to me, I left him with a warning to be cautious because these things can be fly by night operations and that most people need to lose for a very few to win, and that he can win only if he is part of the very best promoters/sellers. I said that on purpose to gauge whether he is a true believer or a wolf in sheep's clothing but his response was a sort of genuine disbelief that his business was zero sum.

I walked away feeling sad. This guy is really trying to better his life for him and his family and what does life give him? A shitty MLM scheme that will likely harm him and he doesn't know any better. I have this special hatred for MLM schemes, right up there with religion. The deviousness lies in the difficulty to see MLM schemes for what they are prima facie when it is obfuscated with legitimate business practices, as is what most of these companies do.

I should talk to him again and maybe get him to change his mind. Back to my original question; the people who I want to help can not afford or want to attend things like a CFAR work shop, how do you help these people? And introducing people to LW is tricky. LW isn't really accessible, it doesn't find you, you find it.

The issue of "watering down" one's GPA by taking more classes is already being significantly addressed by colleges and high schools.

Most top colleges examine unweighted GPAs rather than weighted ones. Unweighted GPAs cannot be watered down by non honors classes, and have better predictive validity for college grades than weighted GPAs. One might be inclined to think that this provides incentives for taking easy classes, but the top schools are simply not going to take you seriously if you adopt this strategy (speaking from personal experience at a top liberal arts college and having seen the data on the average number of AP classes taken).

On the high school end, many high schools (including my own former school) have switched away from a weighted average system for class rank. Instead, they use a system where one's GPA for class rank purposes = 36 * (unweighted GPA) + .5 (number of honors classes taken) + 1(number of AP classes taken). The additive system prevents the possibility of having one's GPA watered down. Some high schools go further by adding additional points for taking extra classes beyond the number required for graduation, further encouraging the taking of additional classes regardless of their honor/AP status.

After doing a little research on the Pomodoro technique, I couldn't really find any studies on their effectiveness. The anecdotal evidence is enticing (and preliminary trials of my own have been positive), but has anyone seen good research done on it or similar productivity methods?

Diversification then decreases payoff for such cheating; sufficient diversification can make it economically non viable for selfish parties to fake the signals.

I find this nonobvious; could you elaborate?