Well, as the post is mainly dealing with hostile arguers that have ultimate power over you, that seems justified. Play around with looking for "challenging and enlightening" arguments when it's not so dangerous.

I have no horse in this race, but I note that right after saying this,

You read someone's mind and accuse them of making a "dominance attempt" because you don't like the writing style.

you proceed to say this, doing the exact same thing you condemn wedrifid for doing:

You have developed a plethora of self-protective rationalizations, hostile arguer, clever arguer, anything but your own inability to defend your positions in actual debate... Your own dominance strivings (and chronic injustice collecting) keep you from engaging in argument honestly.

Irony much?

Can't imagine who'd have guessed your exact intention just based on your initial response, though.

You are probably right and I am responsible for managing the predictable response to my words. Thankyou for the feedback.

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?]

I'm assuming "false" here is based on the assumption that upvotes/downvotes should be a reflection of the voter's opinion of the particular comment being voted on, not his or her opinion of the user making the comment without regard to the content of the comment itself. Mass downvoting seems like a strategy for conveying a message about a user, not a comment, and that is plausibly a subversion of the karma system's intent.

No rule prohibited mass downvoting. Who is to say (retroactively!) that a voter cannot rationally and sincerely determine that the best signal he or she can provide is one that is negative about a particular poster, based on generalizations about the content? E.Y. has advised users that they need not have a rational reason to downvote; not liking something suffices. Well, why not dislike everything by some poster?

This site, moreover, implies that voting is anonymous. Trike arrogated the right to determine voter identity: it invaded the user's privacy!

The karma system is inherently corrupt and manipulative. That you have to violate posters' rights to make it work is just further proof.

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.

The main question is why is automation associated with unemployment today when it wasn't in the past.

It was, or at least has been at some points. Our word "Luddite" originally referred to members of an an anti-automation movement active in the early 19th century, which believed that powered looms and similar devices would lead to unemployment among the artisan classes.

In actual fact the Industrial Revolution ended up creating more jobs than it destroyed, thanks to lower prices for manufactured goods expanding the customer base, but the jobs that it created did demand less skill and were lower-paying than their predecessors, at least until the labor movement caught up. The analogy to the service sector's expansion at the expense of the manufacturing sector isn't perfect, but I think it's closer than you're giving it credit for.