An alternative, courtesy of Anders Sandberg (via Kaj Sotala), is to set your alarm to ring two hours before your desired wake-up time, take one or two 50mg caffeine pills when it rings, and go back to sleep immediately thereafter. When you wake two hours later, getting out of bed shouldn't be a problem. Details here.

Be aware that there's significant research that extrinsic motivators crowd out intrinsic ones. Essentially, they increase total motivation at the cost of sometimes reducing intrinsic motivation, which in turn creates a reliance on the extrinsic motivators. A good book on the subject is Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, but if you do decide to read the book, be aware that the author is biased towards self-determination theory.

How trainable is the trait of Conscientiousness? Is it as rigid as I.Q?

As has been raised by others, just because the design space is large, does not imply that the possibilities have high probability of being actualized.

Your argument shows that there is possibility. And, I think, nothing more. But yes, exempting existential catastrophe, I don't see how transhumanism is avoidable.

This is me making a public commitment to get #'s 6 or 8 done within the next 3 months, one of which will be my first post to LessWrong.

As a non-veteran Less Wronger, I found this book both enjoyable and valuable.

The value came from the same place as the enjoyment - despite knowing about our many flaws in thinking (I've read the sequences and a few rationality books), it's different when you see real-world examples. Specifically, this book partially motivated me to start re-learning the actual math (e.g. http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-30-introduction-to-statistical-methods-in-economics-spring-2009/lecture-notes/).

Nope, that's me.

ETA: OK, one of these is me and the other is Silver. Glad that's sorted out. :)

I've looked at many of the actual studies, although not the recent one you mentioned. I agree with your overall analysis, but would add one addendum - there are different types of happiness. The delineation I find most applicable here would be Daniel Kahneman's. He suggests that there are two types of happiness - experiential and remembering.

Experiential is measured by his day reconstruction method, as well as the experience sampling method mentioned by benthamite. Call it hedonic, moment by moment happiness.

Remembering is as it suggests - how we feel when we remember our past. This is why meaning has importance - we like to feel we've done things with our lives (e.g. he suggests this is why we try to fill our lives with 'memorable' events, even when these events themselves do not create the largest positive affect at the time).

As you've said, the papers are mixed on the experiential happiness side - some papers (self-report + experience sampling + day reconstruction) vote positive, others negative. On the remembering side, all papers I've seen have reported increases. What does this mean? I have no idea - the problem is that happiness is poorly understood.

Usually this is not a problem - most decisions lean quiet clearly in one direction or the other - that is, clearly increase happiness or clearly don't. What does it mean if parents report lower life satisfaction, but higher meaning in life? No idea.

But as the research stands now, I personally would not have children. Consider the effort required to raise children. Take that same effort and apply it to other areas of your life, where the happiness research is more clear, and your return on investment will be much higher (by an order of magnitude, given the effort required to raise children).

I'm tempted to conclude that your current accumulated utility given LW is lower than given (counterfactual no-LW), but that in counterpart/compensation your future expected utility has risen considerably by unknown margins with a relatively high confidence.

Is this an incorrect interpretation of the subtext? Am I reading too much into it?

Can anyone attest to getting real instrumental benefit from SI/LW rationality training, whether from SI bootcamps or just from reading LessWrong?

I don't just mean "feeling better about myself," but identifiable and definite improvements, like getting a good job in one week after two years without success.