Would you care to elaborate on your personal example? You said what you earned, but not how you did it..

This doesn't pattern-match to a sales-pitch at all. What does Louie stand to gain by you following his advice?

As your post stands, you make six whole paragraphs out of cherry-picked quotes and "this sounds persuasive". Most egregious of all is your conclusion:

There are many ways to optimize one's income and savings rates.

As if this is somehow a point against Louie!

I'd like to raise a "dark arts" objection here. This article is written with a lot of presuppositions, strawman attacks, appeals to character, and other interpersonal but non-rational attempts to convince social humans.

For example, the article leads with "You're young, smart, and hoping to have a positive impact on the world." While that may be true of the majority of less wrong readers, the article does not discuss why these qualities are relevant. In fact, the article suggests ways to have less impact on the world - working through a service position - than other careers (such as existential risk reduction). This leads me to believe that this opening line is nothing more than a compliment intended to endear the reader.

The following wording reads like a sales pitch and is highly suspect: "And it is possible to find easily obtained, low-stress jobs with flexible hours that allow you to save as much money as someone in the USA making $100,000/yr... if you leave the USA to look for them."

A classic promise - easy money, with a small catch. Can you rewrite this is as a description of the work you personally experienced, rather than an ambiguous promise?

You disarm objections without providing evidence via, "Your instinctive reaction is probably that there’s no free lunch, so I must be mistaken or dishonest." and follow up with a reiteration of the sales pitch and another appeal to the reader's character in "And while you may have the right prior, I hope to persuade you that these jobs exist and tell you how to get one if you're interested."

More sales-ish writing: "This, I think, is a special opportunity ..." followed by a reiteration of the sales pitch. Why not say, "Act now! Limited supplies available?" It has the same content and validity, absent evidence or justification WHY this is a special opportunity. If anything, rationalists are not the best target market here: low income, low skill US wage earners are.

You fail to discuss your personal experience (other than providing a smiling picture of an attractive young male engaging in the activity you propose - another sales tactic). You don't discuss why you can easily get a job as a bartender (likely that you're a charasmatic, attractive young person) but instead imply that the entire area is somehow 'easier.'

As a personal example for credibility, I made $44,000 in the United States last year working only 5 months out of the year. I was able to save $19,000 of that, after taxes, living expenses, and several luxuries like months-long trips abroad.

There are many ways to optimize one's income and savings rates.

I'm glad you brought this up. I actually anticipated this question and wrote up a responses in an earlier draft of this article but it didn't end up making the final cut because it's more my intuitive opinion rather than a well-established fact.

Most people capable of following this analysis without throwing their hands up in confusion or reacting to it emotionally are probably on life auto-pilot [see Concern 1 below] and optimizing heavily for prestige at the expense of all other goals. They want to be a Professor, Doctor, Software Engineer... something that impresses other people (and perhaps more importantly, impresses themselves). Sure, they don’t say it like that, but when you confront them with an opportunity like this to earn more real money and have a better overall job experience, in a way that doesn’t include the same kind of prestige they were aiming for, they suddenly have all these interesting objections (link false objection) about why it couldn’t work for them.

[Concern 1] Some people are probably thinking, “But why not combine the thing you do for money with your intellectual pursuits??” What can I say. The economy is dumb. If the value you’re creating doesn’t exist in the next fiscal quarter (or at least the next 1-5 years), our economy doesn’t value it. Since good ideas are essentially free to transmit forward into the future indefinitely, the total value of your good ideas are more heavily concentrated in 2016 - 3000, not in 2011-2015. Unfortunately, that same period of time that gets the majority of value from your good ideas isn’t part of the “long term” economic time horizon of 5 years from now so it gets discounted down to zero. So you shouldn’t be surprised to find that there are far fewer employment opportunities for pursuing intellectual careers than people who are capable of carrying out highly valuable careers doing intellectual work. In fact, it seems like the few jobs that do exist for “intellectual pursuits” like professorships and think tank work are basically economic mistakes which are primarily funded as a way to gain status from new ideas, not to create economic value from them. Are you sure you want to marry your financial well-being to the availability of these scarce, arbitrary, economic mistakes?