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?]

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.

The main question is why is automation associated with unemployment today when it wasn't in the past. To answer, you have to consider the kinds of jobs created by and lost to automation and the determinants of workers incomes in the jobs.

Most of the industrial revolution is associated an increasing number of workers in manufacturing and fewer in farming. The industrial work force grew primarily at the expense of the peasants or farmers. Today, automation is causing manufacturing jobs to be replaced by service jobs. Farming jobs were the first to go because our need for foodstuffs is limited. Manufacturing jobs went next because manufacturing is easier to automate than services.

But manufacturing jobs paid better than farming jobs; service-industry jobs pay worse than manufacturing jobs. If the jobs pay better, there are also more of them, because well-paid citizens create greater aggregate demand. So today we have manufacturing jobs declining relative to service-industry jobs with the result that the workforce is poorer, which means fewer workers can be employed.

The explanation lies in whatever causes some jobs to be paid considerably more than others. It could be status. Manufacturing jobs are higher status than farming jobs because the city is high status compared to the sticks. And service industry is low status because of the low status of servitude. Groups of workers with higher status get paid better. It probably makes a greater difference than we realize.

Allow me, please, to question whether a book precis should be on "Main." An ordinary precis doesn't represent a "top level" contribution. Putting this on Main makes it look like a "top ten" poster can get upvoted by posting almost anything, anywhere.

The reply is a non-sequitur, because even if one accepted the implied unlikely propsition that no such persons exist or ever have existed, the terminological question would remain.