Oh dear god don't change the title. It scans fine...

Update!

So, yeah, I overestimated the extent to which I could override a certain lack of intrinsic desire to do things, in addition to having been a little depressed in the first week. I ended up completing 14 of the possible 30 tasks, while failing those that were on average grander undertakings, that would have been diving into hierarchical chunks instead of linear ones. Although I missed some easy ones too, 'go swimming', 'use new sewing machine'.

To improve this, I think I should in advance plan out what sub-tasks each individual task requires, to make the actual task have a smaller at-the-time-of-getting-down-to-doing-it motivational barrier. If there were some cloud web application that could do this (similar to Mind Map software but more convenient to use) that would be useful (I'd been developing one myself but - ironically - lost the motivation).

In total, it was an interesting experiment that would do better with modifications which could probably be enacted fairly easily, and efficiently if done online. I'm not sure of any current social-commitment website that has the flexbility to have let me manage this on my preferred terms. This is something perhaps to look at. I would like to try this again in the future with modifications.

I haven't read a wide plethora of fiction so I might have lower standards, but I enjoyed/am enjoying them (currently half way through the 3rd, skipped the 1st due to having watched the film, may not return to it). I've read a significant amount of the sequences and didn't feel like the books interact negatively with rationality ideas; the heroine is fairly lucid and has fewer than average dogmas, so isn't annoying in that respect.

I had a good time and enjoyed the conversation. I appreciate the effort everyone took to come out and be interesting!

Does anyone have any plans to draw up the cognitive biases hierarchy that was suggested? (Maybe a collaborative Google Documents drawing would be useful for this.) Given I'd find use in such a diagram myself, I'm not in a position to start one. At a later stage I could throw together some html and javascript to present the diagram as a web page, possibly with interactivity to reveal more detail on examples, the experiments, counter-heuristics and citations, etc.

True, especially on the last point. It still feels like there's a large philosophical knowledge-set to convey before their Patronus fails reliably for the right reason. I see what you mean though. Maybe the habit (mental) necessarily built into the Patronus charm would be harder to override more than temporarily due to the strength in habit, or at least without genuinely shifting how that person conceptualises all the relevant stuff.

I thought that was odd: that they would actually have to understand, and not just be told that Dementors are death. Like in the same way that under-confidence in your ability to perform a physical action actually undermines your ability to do it, which should be relatable if you've ever tried to back-flip on a trampoline or forced yourself to perform an action in spite of an anticipation of pain or great displeasure -- but so long as you expect being able to do it, you can still do it. But if someone just said 'Dementors are death', you'd cast your animal patronus just fine so long as you didn't grok it. Which made me suspicious of Harry's possible tactic in the Wizengamot.