Your post title is misleading, or at least ambiguous-- I thought the post would be about building the LW community.

I think How-To and Recommendation Posts would be better, though it may be improvable.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/a08/topics_from_procedural_knowledge_gaps/

A list of what's covered in the original post

say, all those links point to just http://lesswrong.com. Fix it please.

There's also software that can track your nutrients and calories. Toying with it, adding random foods helps one get a better intuitive assessment of foods nutrition. After a while you'll just start to know what to roughly expect of the food on your platter.

Also, while the prior probability of winning is (should be) higher in the rationality group, and lower outside, there are likely still many more winners outside the rationality group, because there are so many more people outside it than within. Making use of the availability heuristic to estimate "winning" and decide whether rationality pays off won't work well.

That's a very important and basic observation.

You missed another example : cancer. Cankerous cells are much better at replicating themselves than normal cells are. Pluricellular organisms have a multitude of systems to keep their component cells in check, yet they still fail at it from time to time. Biology has had billions of years of evolution to fine tune how it enforces cooperation within larger organisms. Can we do better, especially as the components we're considering at our scale may be as complex and clever to us as cells are to an organism? (Meaning we may not have a comparative advantage even though we're subtler than evolution).

So aside from asking what we can do next, I'd like to add : "Can we do something next?" In order to enforce a system within which you won't observe such an effect, you might need to be larger, have more resources than the sum of all you're trying to steer. Otherwise, some part of that system will eventually take over. And even then, chance events may always remain beyond your capacity to control.

Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer ever.

Granted, it's likely he may have been innovative back then, and he may have left a trace on society. So what? The guy picked low-hanging fruits.

Furthermore, I find it difficult to believe no one ever did better since then, especially if considering all cultures and writers, in a span of 400 years. Especially since people's taste in literature and stories vary.

Revering Shakespeare seems like a cached thought and an applause light more than anything. It's like saying the Bible is the greatest book ever written. Both could only become so successful because of the appalling lack of any serious competition.

(Let's collect academic opinions here)

The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it's pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn't follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn't quite consider any wider social repercussions.

http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html

I wonder if being able to get into a dissociative-like state at will, where you didn't actually feel like being yourself, but rather like an external spectator to your own feelings, would help with being able to take a more objective, far view on your own feelings. Are there drugs that can help achieve that safely anyway?

I seem to recall Michael Vassar summarizing Robert Greene as essentially "repetitively associate yourself with positive feelings in other people's head regardless of whether those feelings have anything to do about you."

Brains can't compartmentalize such feelings well. Given enough time and repetitions, even being aware of it, I suspect you'd come to like or dislike someone if you consistently had good or bad feelings when you met, regardless of whether those had anything to do with that person.