As instrumental rationalists, this is the territory we want to be in. We want to beat the market rate for turning effort into influence.

Would someone be so kind as to direct me to a forum for epistemic rationalists?

[Who wants to talk to folks about important matters when they declare their willingness to deceive even themselves if it gets them what they want?]

That rationale for the karma system would be the rankest hypocrisy. To facilitate the upvoting of particular commenters—regardless of content—LW records karma totals.

Commenters minunderstand your problem and your argument for its solution. I take your problem to be "What could the probability of a mathematical proposition be besides its comparative likelihood of proof or disproof?

Perhaps the answer is that there are reasons besides proof to believe even a mathematical proposition. Empirical reasons, that is.

While these are all interesting empirical findings, there’s a very similar phenomenon that’s much less debated and which could explain many of these observations, but I think gets too little popular attention in these discussions.

But you don't explain the findings!

I once asked a room full of about 100 neuroscientists whether willpower depletion was a thing,

I don't even know what that question is supposed to mean.

You overemphasize that this worked for you and made you productive. It's not just a matter of different strokes for different folks. It's more basic: you really don't know that your productivity increase is due to the particular techniques, and the nontestimonal evidence for the techniques is weak or nonexistent. (For example, commenters have pointed out that they can find nothing rigorous on prodromo.)

Anti-procrastination is like dieting. Achieving a large weight loss over eight months doesn't make the diet effective: most people regain the lost weight.

Expect your results not only to regress to the mean but also to be subject to the same yoyo effect as dieting. You are probably creating a long-term willpower deficit that will ultimately take its toll.

Sorry for the pessimism, but you're creating unrealistic expectations in your audience.

In comparing the skills of just the manufacturing jobs created and lost, you ignore the seismic and dominating change in the urban/rural ratio. The process can be seen at an accelerated rate today in China: peasants transformed into workers and getting paid higher income as the result, thus expanding the economy. Peasants to workers is a much weightier trend than skilled workers to unskilled workers.