On the other hand, you also have the problem of people who will ask questions that could be answered in a 1-minute Google search or by reading the documentation, thus breaking the flow of the senior programmer and wasting 30 minutes of their time.

It does go both ways.

My personal policy is to spend 5-10 minutes searching if I'd be interrupting someone's concentration.

Like maia said, females get told this is unhygienic. Not the first time I've seen advice-specific-to-one-gender generalized to another, especially since OrphanWilde is generalizing the other way in recommending back-to-front :)

Downvoted: This is potentially harmful advice if you have a vagina.

The majority of cases of cystitis or urethritis are from E. coli, the normal flora that lives in your gastrointestinal tract. This helps you digest your food, but if you wipe from back to front you risk smearing it to your urethral meatus (pee hole). Then the bacteria get into a sterile environment [your pee hole] and cause a UTI. This was traditionally taught in medical school to be "Honeymoon cystitis" as many women would get UTIs after their vigorous honeymoon weekend and come back with this normal infection. Maybe we see less of this these days with premarital sex and living together.

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5805108/which-direction-should-i-wipe

Quoth said Wikipedia article, in the "criticisms":

"EBM applies to groups of people but this does not preclude clinicians from using their personal experience in deciding how to treat each patient. One author advises that "the knowledge gained from clinical research does not directly answer the primary clinical question of what is best for the patient at hand" and suggests that evidence-based medicine should not discount the value of clinical experience.[26] Another author stated that "the practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research".[1]"

Which suggests that the precursor to EBM is a combination of Education and Intuition. Sorry if I'm not framing it terribly well - there's an intuitive category in my head for this method, but I've never really had to refer to it explicitly. It's the same technique I use to troubleshoot computer problems - I get a hunch as to what is causing it, and then proceed through a mixture of "safe, generalized advice" (try rebooting!) and "advice specific to the problem I think it is" (aha, you must not have your DNS configured correctly). If both of those fail, THEN I'll resort to actually collecting data, analyzing it, and seeing where that leads me - "have you had other problems?", "hmm, let me look up this error code..."

I've generally observed this path as the default human behavior, with "call someone else" occurring when they hit the limit of their abilities.

Australia seems to have cracked training people not to litter.

Having visited downtown Sydney for New Year's Eve 2011, I'm sort of shocked to hear someone claim this. Sydney was definitely subpar compared to my home towns (Seattle, WA and Portland, OR, both in the USA), and I was shocked how few rubbish bins there were. It genuinely bothered me a few times to be in such a gorgeous city and see it marred by litter.

The problem did seem localized to downtown - I didn't see much of any litter out in the suburbs. I was down there for a couple weeks (Christmas through to ~7th January), so it wasn't just the New Year's messes I saw (and that mess was still worse than I'd expect from a similar event in Seattle)

It seems like this assumes some kind of conservation of failure

Yeah, more or less. From my personal experience, it seems to require about the same amount of willpower to get either a string of small failures or a single big failure. I have no clue why this is, beyond the basic theory of "success chains" being good for motivating us - a single break doesn't seem to slow down motivation, but a lot of little ones tend to kill it.

Hmmm, given that some people look at this advice as "obvious" and others are utterly baffled by it, there's a chance that this advice only works for a certain segment of the population. It might help to model this as general advice, regardless of goal: I learned about it in terms of building career skills and fixing sleep schedules, and just naively started using it to build my diets on the assumption that it was a generic pattern (for me, at least, it's where all my semi-stable diets come from)

It seems to scale to willpower: For some people, "a single small failure once per month" is going to be an impossible goal, but "multiple small failures OR one big failure" is an option. If and only if one is dealing with THAT choice, it seems like a single big failure does a lot less damage to motivation.

If you've got different anecdotes then I think we'll just have to agree to disagree. If you've got studies saying I'm wrong, I'm happy to accept that I'm wrong - I know it worked, since I used this to help fix my spouse's sleep cycle, but that doesn't mean it worked for the reasons I think. :)

from you:

we can't actually solve the easy problems either.

and from me:

Implicit in that should have been the idea that CEV is still ridiculously difficult.

So, um, we agree, huzzah? :)

seems pretty reasonable if you operate in a social environment where small and large transgressions of rules are punished equally severely

I wouldn't call that a primarily social phenomenon, since this seems to happen with internal thought processes just as easily, but that's more of a minor nit-pick in phrasing. I think you're spot-on about rational adaptation to perverse incentives :)