Why?

I cringe at the term x-risk.

And for this post, I use "benefits" or "practical benefits" to mean anything not relating to philosophy, truth, winning debates, or a sense of personal satisfaction from understanding things better. Money, status, popularity, and scientific discovery all count.

In my life, I've used rationality to tackle some pretty tough practical problems. The type of rationality I have been successful with hasn't been the debiasing program of Overcoming Bias, yet I have been employing scientific thinking, induction, and heuristic to certain problems in ways that are atypical for the category of people you are calling normal rationalists. I don't know whether to call this "x-rationality" or not, partly because I'm not sure the boundaries between rationality and x-rationality are always obvious, but it's certainly more advanced rationality than what people usually apply in the domains below.

On a general level, I've been studying how to get good (or at least, dramatically better) at things. Here are some areas where I've been successful using rationality:

• Recovering from social anxiety disorder and depression
• Social skills
• Fashion sense
• Popularity / social status in peer group
• Dating

I'm not using success necessarily to mean mastery, but around 1-2 standard deviations of improvement from where I started.

I do find it interesting that many people are not achieving practical benefits from their studies of more advanced rationalities. I agree with you that akrasia is a large factor in why they do not get significant practical benefits out of rationality. I am going to hypothesize an additional factor:

The practical benefits of x-rationality are constrained because students of x-rationality (such as the Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong) schools of thought focus on critical rationality, yet critical rationality is only good for solving certain types of problems.

In my post on heuristic, I drew a distinction between what I'm calling "critical rationality" (consisting of logic, skepticism, and bias-reduction) and "creative rationality" (consisting of heuristic and inference). Critical rationality concerns itself with idea validation, while creative rationality concerns itself with idea creation (specifically, of ideas that map onto the territory).

Critical rationality is necessary to avoid many mistakes in life (e.g. spending all your money on lottery tickets, high-interest credit card debt, Scientology), yet perhaps it runs into diminishing returns for success in most people's lives. For developing new ideas and skills that would lead people to success above a mundane level, critical rationality is necessary but not sufficient, and creative rationality is also required.

You're using "socialism" vaguely. Iron curtain socialism was awful. North-western European social democracy is not.

“Don't we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it...There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language.”

― Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

One major example of a situation where you'll want to hack your terminal goals is if you're single and want to get into a relationship: you're far more likely to succeed if you genuinely enjoy the company of members-of-your-preferred-sex even when you don't think that it will lead to anything.

I seem to remember the answer being that cycling is more dangerous per mile than driving, but that the increase in physical fitness more than compensates in all-cause mortality terms. The first paper I found seems to point to the same conclusion.

I don't know how that would be adjusted in someone that already has fitness habits. It probably also depends on how well developed the cycling infrastructure in your town is, but I've never seen any actual data on that either.

Agreed. The reason I link the two abilities is that I'm assuming an AI that acquires either power went FOOM, which makes it much more likely that the two powers will arise at (on a human scale) essentially the same time.

Precautionary and Anti-Precautionary Heuristics. When harm is unbounded, never use a new technology if a more ancient one does the same function. When harm is bounded, never use a known technology if a newer one can do the same function. (Background: I just had a run-in on twitter with C Venter who was trying to invoke GMOs (Vitamin rice) as the only alternative to children's blindness (or moral grounds) when one can give these kids, carrots or pills, instead. But then Monsanto and other labs would never benefit from these standard solutions...)

Nassim Taleb

You have a limited number of teeth to experiment with.