This is excellent advice, and I up-voted it. However:

If she seems annoyed or condescending or whatever, try to shrug it off; just smile and say "okay, no problem" or something along those lines. Do the same thing if she says "I'd rather just be friends." (But for the love of Pete, do not spend a lot of effort trying to actually cultivate a friendship. Moooooove on.)

I may just be reading too much into things, and I acknowledge that this comment is written primarily as a response to the question "how to get into a relationship". Nevertheless, this bit bothers me a bit, as the "for the love of, don't try to actually cultivate a friendship" part seems to imply that there's no point in being friends with women if you're not going to have a relationship with them. That strikes me as a bit offensive.

Even if we're assuming that you're purpose is solely to get women, I don't think befriending lots of them is as useless as you seem to suggest. You say yourself that one's friends may introduce one to somebody one might be interested in. People tend to have more same-sex friends than opposite-sex friends, so being friends with lots of women will increase your chances of one of them introducing you to a friend of theirs. I also suspect that women are more likely than men to do this.

I do admit that this may not be the most efficient approach if you're optimizing purely for finding a romantic relationship in minimum time. But on the other hand, it can wield you rewarding friendships that persist long after the end of your relationship with whoever it was you eventually found, so personally I'd find it worth it.

I should also mention that my experience somewhat mirrors MBlume's, and I find the notion of becoming involved with someone before being good friends with them a little off-putting. Which is not to say that it would never have happened to me, though. (Without going to details, suffice to say that I've both had relationships with women I was friends with from before, and with women where that wasn't the case.)

Monoidealism: +6. Works every time I actually execute it correctly, but thinking about nothing else is hard.

The thought/feeling that it's hard is just another thought. Let go of it too, and it'll become easier, at least in that moment. ;-)

• Getting Things Done: +4. Makes a big difference, but the problem is that it requires the complete system. It works well when everything is included, but eventually I end up skipping a weekly review and the usefulness drops fast. Another thing is that I have to include everything I'm going to do in it. Including "for-fun" activities. If I don't, it's going to turn into a list of things I don't want to do and I'll resist looking at the whole list. Up-to-date it's worth more than +4, but since it doesn't usually stay that way...
• Meditation: +3. Calmer, less stressful emotional state.Makes it easier to hold a wider perspective. Doesn't help with akrasia directly, but is a significant indirect support and is good for for my general outlook on life.
• Regular exercise: +8. Essential. I don't see this as much as a positive thing as I'll get depressed soon if I don't get this.
• Monoidealism: +6. Works every time I actually execute it correctly, but thinking about nothing else is hard. This trick interacts well with meditation because it increases my ability to execute it.

Edit: Fix some typos.

I think the next time I hear about a productivity technique, I'll think about which of these categories it fits in. Consider that a compliment.

Regarding the writing style, I thought the abstract went a with overboard with academic formality, though that might have been because I was contrasting it to previous writing I have seen from you. The rest of the article was well written. The biggest improvement is only using emphases when they count.

On point 2, I wonder how to generalize this lesson. I can see that many people follow similar practices for tracking their spending, and many of them claim similar benefits. But how would you know where else to apply the technique? Few people claim to do the same thing with their time; why is that different? How would you suggest generalizing this approach? What other arenas might it be applicable in? Or is only valuable for increasing awareness of expenses?

But if you don't care about the truth - and you have nothing to protect - and you're not attracted to the thought of pushing your art as far as it can go - and your current life seems to be going fine - and you have a sense that your mental well-being depends on illusions you'd rather not think about -

..then it may already be too late, since the seed of doubt is already planted.

I live in Oulu.

Yvain, I enjoy your posts, and generally find them useful, informative, and well written.

I also recognize that this view is controversial in some circles, but one thing that would make me enjoy them rather more is if you managed to ferret out the implicit assumption that crops up every now and then that your rationalist protagonists are necessarily male. (Or at least predominantly so, I haven't been back to do an exhaustive stock-take of your gender specific pronoun usage, but I do recall being struck by this at least once before, so I figured it was worth a comment this time.)

Just to clarify, I don't mean Theo here. If you want to use a specifically male example, that's fine. But phrases like "the most important reason to argue with someone is to change his mind" and "[e]ither a person has enough of the rationalist virtues to overcome it, or he doesn't" strike me as problematic.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that you're being consciously sexist here. In fitting with the theme of this post, I spent a fair while rejecting others' calls for gender neutral language under the mistaken (largely emotional) impression that agreeing with them would have be an admission of some deep moral flaw in me, rather than merely a small and relatively painless step towards inclusiveness - and ultimately better communication.

I have very few memories of my childhood (or indeed anything older than a few weeks), but perhaps the turning point I remember was in Lutheran confirmation school when the priest was discussing conscience. I realized that the notion of God was actually superfluous and everything that had been said would stand as well without it. After this I looked at every discussion and explanation with different eyes and soon lost my faith, although I dind't officially leave religion until four years later after high school.

I was never very religious, probably because my family belongs in church but that doesn't really show in daily life. Still, I did believe and getting rid of that made did a big difference. My mother has told be that at some of the first years in school I was confused because I had asked her about why world exists and been told about Big Bang and in the school the teacher had told that it was greated by God. So I might have gotten a few years of hints before getting it. :)

Currently I'm studying theoretical physics and until recently my rationalism has been what Eliezer would call Traditional Rationalism and what you get from scientific education, but it has been changing since I discovered Overcoming Bias and especially Eliezer's posts. They've been mind-expanding to read, I'm in debt to all of the contributors. It remains to be seen if I can actually turn them into pragmatic results. Hopefully LW can help me and everyone else on that journey.