Per our email exchange, here is the condensed version that uses only your original writing:

"Our brains' pattern recognition capabilities are far stronger than our ability to reason explicitly. Most people can recognize cats across contexts with little mental exertion. By way of contrast, explicitly constructing a formal algorithm that can consistently cats across contexts requires great scientific ability and cognitive exertion.

Very high level epistemic rationality is about retraining one's brain to be able to see patterns in the evidence in the same way that we can see patterns when we observe the world with our eyes. Reasoning plays a role, but a relatively small one. Sufficiently high quality mathematicians don't make their discoveries through reasoning. The mathematical proof is the very last step: you do it to check that your eyes weren't deceiving you, but you know ahead of time that it's your eyes probably weren't deceiving you.

I have a lot of evidence that this way of thinking is how the most effective people think about the world. I would like to share what I learned. I think that what I've learned is something that lots of people are capable of learning, and that learning it would greatly improve people's effectiveness. But communicating the information is very difficult.

It took me 10,000+ hours to learn how to "see" patterns in evidence in the way that I can now. Right now, I don't know how to communicate how to do it succinctly. In order to succeed, I need collaborators who are open to spend a lot of time thinking carefully about the material, to get to the point of being able to teach others. I'd welcome any suggestions for how to find collaborators."

Notes:

• I removed all the quotations. Although I'm guessing they were probably key to your own understanding of the issue, I don't think they are an efficient way to improve other people's understanding.
• Much of the post was dedicated (unnecessarily) to why your viewpoint is right rather than just stating your viewpoint. People who agree with you don't need to be convinced. People who disagree with you aren't going to be swayed by your arguments.
• I removed a few paragraphs that repeated themselves.

I have this issue with motivation. I need to clean my house, but I have a difficult time getting myself to do it, unless I think I can finish it all at once. For example, based on past experience, it takes me around three hours of focused effort to get things from where they are now to satisfactory, but I only have ninety minutes. While I could get half-way there now, and finish up sometime later in the week, I imagine myself working hard for 90 minutes, and still having a messy house. Then I do something else instead, unless I'm in a state where cleaning seems less unpleasant than usual.

Does anybody have advice for combating this problem?

(edited for a typo)

Make a plan that you can do in 90 minutes, where the outcome will be better than the starting position.

Next time, make another 90-minute plan.

Maybe this will be less effective in total, e.g. you might need three or four 90-minute sessions to accomplish what you could do in a single 180-minute session. But if the 180-minute session is unavailable, this is the best option you have.

For example: Instead of vacuuming the whole house, do one room at a time. Instead of putting all things to their places, on day 1 collect all things and put them into a temporary basket, and on day 2 take a few random things from the basket and put them where they belong.

If you cleaned really frequently in small bursts (say, for 20 minutes a day, almost every day?), starting from your "satisfactory" point, would that be enough to maintain the satisfactory point more or less continuously? Then each 20-minute burst of work would come with the "satisfactory state" reward.

One of the most popular LW posts ever is on this topic:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3w3/how_to_beat_procrastination/

I have this issue with motivation. I need to clean my house, but I have a difficult time getting myself to do it, unless I think I can finish it all at once. For example, based on past experience, it takes me around three hours of focused effort to get things from where they are now to satisfactory, but I only have ninety minutes. While I could get half-way there now, and finish up sometime later in the week, I imagine myself working hard for 90 minutes, and still having a messy house. Then I do something else instead, unless I'm in a state where cleaning seems less unpleasant than usual.

Does anybody have advice for combating this problem?

(edited for a typo)

I am taking a graduate course called "Vision Systems". This course "presents an introduction to the physiology, psychophysics, and computational aspects of vision". The professor teaching the course recommended that those of us that have not taken at least an undergraduate course in perception get an introductory book on the subject. The one he recommends, which is also the one he uses for his undergraduate course, is this: http://www.amazon.com/Sensation-Perception-Looseleaf-Third-Edition/dp/0878938761 Unfortunately, this book goes for $60-75 for used loose leaf, all the way up to $105 for new hardcover. I'd rather not pay that, unless I can get an independent recommendation for it, or for some other book on the subject.

Does anybody here have a recommendation? Are there good course notes available on the web somewhere?

Use delayed responses to wean needy people when you think they are abusing your time and helpfulness. For instance, the new guy comes by asking for help getting started but keeps coming by for things he should do himself. You don't want to be rude but want to stop it. Progression like immediate response->5m->1h->1day has worked for me with email.

Delayed response is also great to cool off heated discussions.

I used to teach physics to pre-med students (a nearly-identical situation to [2] in the original post). I tried to write my exams so that simply memorizing a large set of very specific algorithms for solving a problems wouldn't work, but nobody would have to be very clever in order to get a good grade.

In addition to this, I looked at the course material and asked "Is there anything thing on here that a doctor really needs to know?". I decided it was good for doctors to know how half-lives work, since this is important for things like drug dosing, as well as probably other things I don't even know about (since anything who's rate of decay is proportional to it's value will behave the same way). So, I explained to my students that a discharging capacitor was mathematically identical to the way that some drug concentrations decrease over time, and that there absolutely, positively would be a question about it on the exam. I didn't say anything else very specific about what would be on the rest of the exam. That exam had one question about a discharging capacitor, followed by a second question that was the same as the first, but reworked in terms of drugs. Most students got the first one right, but fewer got the second.

I think that part of my distaste, as an instructor, for students knowing a lot more about what is on the exam was that I wound up talking a lot more about the same things, and it got boring.

The point of the test is to prove that you know the material. If you're taking the class to learn the material, then the only person that you need to prove it to is yourself. You can skip the test altogether. If you also consider getting the degree to be a bonus, you might as well optimize the grade a bit.